


This Jelly

by hexlibris



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Closeted Character, Light Angst, M/M, Nightmares, Sexual Tension, construction worker!Billy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2019-11-04 00:06:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17887736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hexlibris/pseuds/hexlibris
Summary: Steve tells himself that he isn’t sorry to see him go.He tells himself that he doesn’t like him.Not his ringleted hair, long and styled like a girl’s (probably as soft as a girl’s, too, if Steve had been brave enough to reach out and touch it, beguiled by the startling clash of soft hair and hard muscle); not his cartoonishly blue eyes. He doesn’t like the way Billy had smiled, through a mouthful of teeth, when he said Steve’s name:Harrington, right?Overly familiar, taking his sweet fucking time with it. Hips cocked like a loaded pistol, a dare, or maybe even a tease; a silent, provocativecome try me.Steve has barely two inches on him in terms of height, and he dislikes that most of all.Or so he tells himself.





	1. Day 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sightetsound](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sightetsound/gifts).



> For Kayla, to whom I promised this ... what, four months ago now? It took me far too long to get around to it, honestly. I don’t typically gravitate towards Modern AUs but I had this idea when construction started next to my own house (sadly, there are no glossy magazine-cover men walking around) and she was very enthusiastic when I pitched the idea to her—she's always so enthusiastic about anything to do with fandom and fic writing and that's why I wanted to pay it forward! Kayla, you're so kind, talented, and passionate! Thank you for being my friend and always cheerleading in my comments section. I sincerely hope this story lives up to your expectations <3

“Come on, baby, give it to me.”

The BMW rattles up the hill, engine wheezing like the lungs of a geriatric.

“Just a little further, baby,” Steve says.

He presses down on the accelerator with more force; the BMW lets out a tinny whine and a thump, tires squealing erratically over the blacktop. Steve’s going to have to get his brakes tightened again. The tire pressure will need to be checked, too. And then Vinnie from the auto repair shop will try to scam him into spending hundreds of dollars on the replacement of parts, like Vinnie always does. The 733i doesn’t need any of its parts replaced. It’s nearly four decades old, but it’s doing just fine; Steve’s dad owned it before he did, and he said so himself when he first put his son behind the wheel and had him drive in slow figure eights through Loch Nora—although John Harrington quickly parted ways with it once a better model came along.

Steve’s more sentimental with his firsts. The Beemer was his first car. His first parking ticket. Afterwards, it was the site of two other important firsts: the loss of his virginity in the backseat, then getting caught in the act by the Chief of Police. Seven years later and it’s still doing _fine_ as his first car, thank you very much.

“Come _on_ , baby,” he begs.

The whine of the engine has turned into a shriek, an indignant, high-pitched squalling that seems to be crying, _mercy._ Steve keeps a steady pressure on the accelerator, pushing the dial up to sixty, hands like a vice around the wheel. Just a little further. He can see his driveway at the crest of the hill. Can see the gilded ‘4A’ nailed to his letterbox. They’re about a hundred feet away now. Fifty. Almost there …

“Fuck _yes_ , baby! Yes! God, yes!”

With one last sound of defeat, the Beemer rolls to a halt in front of his apartment complex. It seems to collapse against the curb as soon as Steve turns off the engine, settling in a layer of its own exhaust and, more ominously, the metallic tang of spilled gas. Giving the steering wheel an exaggerated kiss, Steve kicks open the passenger door—still attached to its hinges by several sheets of duct tape and pure idiotic luck—and unfolds his legs out into the pre-dawn light.

His shadow cuts a slender figure across the fake grass, shoulders taking on the awkward, self-deprecating hunch that he’s carried with him for as long as he can remember, much to the despair of his teachers and parents. Once Steve reached puberty, he learned to use his terrible posture to his advantage. The hunch, applied at just the right angle at _just_ the right moment, made girls trust him. Made them open up to him, allowing him to drive them home when they had too much to drink at parties and woodland raves. The hunch made him appear soulful, unthreatening. Boy next door. Not like all the other boys, who only ever wanted one thing. Make no mistake: Steve was exactly like other boys, he was just better at pretending he wasn’t.

Seven years since his first car, and all those other firsts in the backseat. Five years since he graduated, and Steve Harrington is still blessed with the winning combination of boyish good looks and subtle charm—although the hunch in his shoulders is more pronounced than it was in his senior year, along with the shadows under his eyes. Stacy Cunningham, whose shapely prom queen legs had been thrown over his shoulders at the exact moment Chief Hopper shone his flashlight through the BMW’s passenger window, now bags his groceries at the local Fair Mart. Adulthood came for them not with a colorful bang but with a slow, gradual slide into irrelevancy—with waking up one day and realizing that, no matter what they told you in school, you’re not special, no one is, and being an adult is not so much about being free from responsibility as it is being chained to it: bills, a demanding boss with demanding workhours, friends you can’t stand, an apartment that’s damp in the winter and too hot in the summer and what the _fuck_ , did he leave his fucking front door open again?

“Fuck,” Steve says, pushing it closed. “ _Fuck._ You stupid—”

He’s swearing openly in the hall; it’s not like there’s anyone around to hear him. No dad to glare at him and tell him to throw his shoulders back, for God’s sake, you’re not a peasant groveling in the dirt; no mom to hover in the doorway and rub her temples with her fingers in quiet anguish. He’s free from all of that now, thank fuck, although he still calls his mom long-distance. It’s part of his routine—because he needs one, is what Dr. O’Connell told him. Said it’s good for insomnia, a routine. A good way to get your circadian rhythm back on its feet, Steven—

Still swearing, the back of his work shirt sticking to his shoulders in a haze of beer and sweat, wishing he had his own beer to nurse between his legs while he watched the sun rise, Steve tosses his keys onto the hook above his toaster, then freezes. Karen Wheeler is sitting at his tiny kitchen table, head in her hands. When Steve clears his throat, she looks up, and bursts into noisy tears.

“He did it again!” she bawls.

“Mrs. Wheeler,” Steve says. ‘ _Karen_ ’ sounds too much like they’re friends, and Steve doesn’t want to be her fucking friend. “Oh, jeez. Mrs. Wheeler, oh, no, don’t—don’t cry—tell me what happened—”

He takes a step forward, reaching out to touch her arm on instinct—then stops himself, because fucking hell, she’s Nancy’s _mom._ It’s inappropriate on so many levels, and Steve really wants to tell her to leave, knows he  _should_ , but the sight of her tears terrifies him. He can barely handle his own emotions, let alone the emotions of others.

“Do you have any wine?” Karen asks, after what feels like a very long time of Steve standing and her sobbing and hiccupping into her fist.

“No,” he says, thinking of the bottle of Merlot stowed on top of his fridge. Karen peers through her tear-droopy eyelashes at him, and he thinks two things: one, that she deserves better, and two, that she already knew about the Merlot on top of his fridge—just like she knows exactly where he keeps his spare key.

“Oh, go on,” she says conspiratorially, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Drinking is never as fun when you’re alone.”

 _You get it from your parents_ , Nancy used to tell him. Nancy, who was always so good at reading people, Steve in particular. Nancy, whose wide, limpid eyes used to remind him of a bird’s: darting and pecking at the gaps in his defenses like they were low-hanging berries in a bush, splitting them open to expose the soft, juicy centers: _you never learned how to set boundaries with them as a child and now you’re paying for it as an adult—_

“Lighter?” he says, pulling the Merlot down from the fridge.

“Of course, honey. I wasn’t born in a barn.”

Steve sets the bottle onto the table along with two glasses. Karen pulls a lighter from the sleeve of her cardigan and hands it to him; she’s wearing slippers instead of the kitten heels Steve’s used to seeing her in, as if she’d gotten into her car and driven here without remembering to change out of her pajamas. Behind them, the sun inches further and further into his closet-sized backyard, exposing the long spikes of uncut grass, the skeleton of a broken pool lounge, and several feet of plain, crooked fencing. It’s seven o’clock in the morning.

Well past his bedtime.

“What happened?” Steve asks, like he knows he’s supposed to. This, too, is routine, although it’s thankfully less regular than the weekly phone calls with his mom.

“Well,” Karen pauses to take the lit cigarette Steve hands her before leaning back, inhaling indulgently, “Ted’s been … I don’t know, _off_ lately. I mean, he’s always off, but this month he was less communicative than usual. I thought the trip to his brother’s for Easter would’ve put a spring in his step, given him time to appreciate what he has, but no, same old Ted. Today’s our anniversary,” she says breathlessly, her lower lip wobbling; another tear springs from her eyelashes like a fallen pearl, “but he said he forgot. _He forgot!_ Our _anniversary!_ ”

“Wow,” Steve says, as per the routine.

He doesn’t want to give her anything more than monosyllable answers, hoping that his stiff replies will somehow silently communicate his discomfort. They’re not friends. Steve dated her daughter, for Christ’s sake. He doesn’t want Karen— _Mrs. Wheeler_ , he reminds himself sharply—to be making assumptions about the situation with Nancy that she has no right to be making.

Karen’s head bobs frantically on her shoulders as she pours him a glass of wine; the red liquid sloshes over the sides and pools onto the tabletop, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She’s crying again, completely lost to her grief for her ailing marriage, and Steve can’t do anything but watch, sickened. “I—I can’t be the only one, right? How many other women have to remind their husbands to perform the most basic responsibilities in a relationship? Tell me this is normal,” she adds, pleading, mascara mixing with the wetness on her face and turning it gray and ghastly.

“It’s not normal,” he says reluctantly. Boundaries, what boundaries?

“I mean,” she goes on, laughing and crying now, angry as well as grieving. “I _mean_ , I know men can be forgetful, but this is—this is celebrating the best day of our lives! But you know Ted, he’s a special kind of forgetful. Like a little boy. You need to remind him to tie his shoelaces before he leaves the house, otherwise he’ll trip over them and break his skull—”

The doorbell rings. Steve sees his opportunity for escape and takes it; he’s not even mad that someone is ringing his doorbell this late. Karen keeps ranting to her wine glass as he bolts to his feet, but he doesn’t hesitate or turn around. He knows that it doesn’t matter who her audience is, as long as it isn’t the bland moonface of her husband.

He rubs at his right eye socket as he makes a beeline for the hall. Thinking: sixteen hours. He’s had his contact lenses in for nearly sixteen hours straight, and that’s got to be some kind of record.

Steve’s still rubbing his eye when he opens the door; distracted by the ache of his lenses stabbing at his cornea, he doesn’t quite process the sight standing on his doorstep for several seconds. Until the ache lessens to a dull pinch, and he’s able to look up, blinking, dazed.

“Hi,” an unfamiliar voice says. “We’re uh, doing some work next door and uh, we kind of need to use your driveway. Is it okay if you move your car?”

Steve removes his thumb from his eye socket, then rubs it again. Roving pinheads of light seesaw across his vision and fade; when they do, he’s still looking into blue. The blue of another person’s eyes; a man, around his age or younger, possibly, but Steve hopes not, because they’re the most beautiful blue eyes he’s ever seen. His mouth hangs ajar. He wants to think of something sarcastic, but the words have left him, fuck, the words have left him and he’s _staring._

“Um,” he says. “Um—”

( _Don’t say ‘um’, Steven._ His dad, curt, jaw clenched. _Were you born with a stutter, son? No, we raised you better than that._ )

He’s made brightly, rudely aware of how bad he smells: not just like beer and sweat and cigarettes, but like the greasy smoke of the kitchen grill, and worse, so much worse, the swollen trash bags he and Robin piled high by the dumpster, their insides hemorrhaging onto the asphalt. That distinctively shitty I-work-in-hospitality smell.

A single thought— _Rolling Stone_ —blazes out at him randomly, piercing through a cloud of exhausted brain-fog like a lighthouse beam; the man looks like he walked straight out of the glossy pages of a magazine, _Rolling Stone_ or _GQ_ or, with that weightlifter’s build, _Men’s Fitness._ Steve sees biceps the size of melons, a chest dark with tattoos—flowers, exotic birds, a woman’s face (the Virgin Mary?)—and tanned thighs that, at first glance, appear as tough as military-grade Kevlar. He has the strangest urge to bounce a nickel off of them, just to hear the clear, satisfying _plink!_ it’d make against the muscle there.

From behind him, Karen calls, “Who’s at the door, Steve?”

 _Rolling Stone_ tilts his magnificent blonde head. He’s smiling; his teeth are the brilliant white of a toothpaste commercial, and very sharp. Steve can’t stop looking at them. He can’t stop looking at _any_ of him. “Is that your girlfriend?”

Something in his tone—a dark, mocking thread, nearly undetectable—has Steve recoiling from him as abruptly as if he’d been doused in cold water. _What the fuck is the matter with you?_ he screams silently at himself. Throwing his shoulders back, he steps past the threshold, tugging at the door handle so that any view an outsider might have of the hall behind him—and of Karen, lovely, nosy, heartbroken Karen—has narrowed to a blurry sliver.

“Mormons!” he shouts over his shoulder.

 _Rolling Stone_ ’s smile widens. “Mormons?” he repeats. Tone polite, apologetic, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes, which remain coldly inquisitive. Steve believes he owns a pair of acid-wash Levi’s that are almost exactly the same shade of blue.

“WhatDoYouWant,” he snaps, all in one tight, explosive breath.

“Harrington, right?” The way _Rolling Stone_ says the name is leisurely, rolling it across his palate and between his white teeth like he’s tasting every letter, seeing how they feel in his mouth. It’s outrageous. It makes Steve’s skin want to stand up and crawl right off his bones. “You ought to read your mail more often. We sent you a letter six months ago about the demolition.”

There comes the thump of the wine bottle from the kitchen, as if Karen’s finished her first glass and is on the verge of pouring herself another. Steve suddenly wishes he were back there with her, getting piteously drunk. “I—I don’t read my mail,” he says.

 _Rolling Stone_ lifts one neatly groomed brow. “Well, maybe you should,” he says. “That way you’d know who I am, Harrington, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

He speaks slowly, like Steve’s someone who’s either stupid or very forgetful. Steve himself uses the same tone when he has to explain to drunk bar patrons that the kitchen closes at ten-thirty and _no_ , you can’t just order a plate of fries to go.

“My name’s Billy,” _Rolling Stone_ continues, “and I’m employed by a company called United Developers. You’re sitting on prime real estate, _mi amigo_. We’re under a contract to develop the land—”

“Do you even have a permit?” Steve tries to interrupt.

“—bring it into the 21st century, you know? Also,” Billy adds, with another wide, sharp grin, “we’ll be knocking your fence down.”

Steve’s stomach turns. “On whose authority?”

“On the authority of Hawkins City Council.” Billy leans in, planting a powerful-looking forearm on the doorframe next to his head. “And yeah, we do have a permit. Is that going to be a problem?”

The question is casual, almost flippant, but Steve understands a nonverbal threat when he sees one. It’s apparent in Billy’s body language, the way he’s leaning into his space—as if trying to intimidate him into taking a step back. Steve’s gaze drifts to the fluorescent orange of his safety vest; the zipper is open all the way down, exposing the pink, hard circles of Billy’s nipples. And then Steve’s wondering fleetingly if those nipples are hard because Billy’s cold, if he should ask him whether he’d like an extra layer to wear, because—because there are still snowmelts on the roads even though it’s spring and he’s sure he has a clean sweatshirt somewhere in his room. Or maybe he’d like to come inside for a cup of tea instead? Coffee, juice, wine? No, Steve thinks, his breath catching. Wondering if he’s blushing, if Billy can see him blushing. No, he’s not that person anymore. He was never that person. He might have digressed once or twice, but that was out of pure hormonal boredom. Easy to get bored, in a town of less than twelve thousand people.

“It’s no problem at all,” he says.

“Good. Because I just want you to understand,” Billy says, eyes colder than ever, “that this kind of job, it’s gonna take six months to complete. Maybe as long as a year and a half. Which means that you and me, we’re going to be … well, we’ll pretty much be next-door neighbors—”

“I get it,” Steve says through gritted teeth. “As long as my Wi-Fi doesn’t get cut off, we’re fine and dandy.”

Billy claps Steve chummily on the shoulder, a blow that almost certainly would’ve sent him flying had he not been holding the door handle in a white-knuckled grip. “See you later,” he says, licking his lips. His tongue is as pink as his nipples.

Turning, giving Steve a lengthy eyeful of the tattoos snaking down the backs of his legs—the word ‘SKATE’ written in bleeding red letters on one ankle, ‘AND DESTROY’ on the other—Billy strides back down the driveway, disappearing into the mass of trees bordering the fence. Steve tells himself that he isn’t sorry to see him go.

He tells himself that he doesn’t like him.

Not his ringleted hair, long and styled like a girl’s (probably as soft as a girl’s, too, if Steve had been brave enough to reach out and touch it, beguiled by the startling clash of soft hair and hard muscle); not his cartoonishly blue eyes. He doesn’t like the way Billy had smiled, through a mouthful of teeth, when he said Steve’s name: _Harrington, right?_ Overly familiar, taking his sweet fucking time with it. Hips cocked like a loaded pistol, a dare, or maybe even a tease; a silent, provocative _come try me._ Steve has barely two inches on him in terms of height, and he dislikes that most of all.

Or so he tells himself.

“Steve?” Karen’s voice says again. “Steve, what—”

“I’ll be right back.” His voice sounds oddly shrill, too cheerful. Half a beat and he’s moving, scurrying down the driveway. Eager to please, anxious about the posing of his limbs, half-expecting an ambush: his dad, or perhaps the ghosts of teenage-dom past—a high, piercing wolf-whistle, a foot sticking out of the hedge to trip him up, a flash of freckles and

( _Harrington, right?_ )

“Stop it,” Steve mutters.

He was tired before; he was so tired he’d been able to feel it lapping at him in waves, waves that started off small at the beginning of his shift and grew steadily larger over twelve hours. Now he is painfully awake, and in desperate need of a drink.

( _Harrington, right?_ )

His mailbox sits at the end of the driveway like a silvery mirage. Steve stares at it morosely, his contact lenses throbbing, heavy as discs atop his cornea. He can see the corner of an envelope protruding through the slit at the top like a tongue, a taunting, upside-down face. In seventh grade he’d broken his arm hanging from the monkey bars doing the same thing. They thought they were invincible back then; boys with plenty of bones to break. More ghostly flashes: Tommy in the locker room, Tommy pressed up against him on the court, goading him, whispering in his ear. _Beer is fine but whiskey is quicker._ The Stacys, the Beckys, the Amys, and the ones whose names he never asked, never called the morning after. All he had of them was the hairs they left on his pillow: copper, black, blonde. Steve would never admit it, but he liked the blonde hairs the most. The blondes were out of his league; the blondes played hard to get.

It’s surreal, watching his fingers drift forwards in mid-air, reaching for the lid of the mailbox. Watching them stop, then start again. The mailbox is full to bursting. Steve knows it is. For the better half of a fortnight, he’d been ignoring it, content with laboring under the delusion that if he did, the contents would simply disappear.

He keeps reaching and doesn’t stop until his fingers hit cool, hard metal. Flipping open the lid and sifting uncertainly through a confusing wad of bank invoices, junk ads, Walmart flyers—there. A flash of rose gold lettering. Nancy’s colors. Steve is floating, reduced to an observer of his own body; he sees himself as he was, at Hawkins High School. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe you ever left. That you’re not eighteen years old anymore.

He sees Nancy as she was: pale, dark-haired, with a delicateness that people often mistook for weakness. Back then she was known as Nancy the princess, the-too-good-for-him. Steve remembers wanting turquoise and gray for the invites, but she’d put him firmly in his place. Rose gold was more romantic, she said. More appropriate for a wedding.

There are two copies of the same invite. One sent at the start of the month, and one that arrived only yesterday. His address is written on both envelopes in Nancy’s sprawling cursive. Steve runs his fingertips over the words, wondering about the hand that had made them. She’d slapped him with that same hand once, crying, her face red with self-righteous anger. _God, Steve, you can be such a_ prick _sometimes._ Had she also cried when she wrote out his address? Or had she felt nothing at all, scraped clean of any emotion she might have had in order to get the job done, in her efficient, business-like, utterly Nancy way?

Breathing deep, Steve forces his floating fingers to pop open the seal of the second invite, scanning the plush, cream-colored card inside with sore, watery eyes.

 

 

_NANCY WHEELER_

_&_

_JONATHAN BYERS_

_request the honor of your presence at the celebration of their union_

_MAY 7, 2017_

_1PM_

_CATHEDRAL OF THE HOLY ANGELS_

_HAWKINS, INDIANA_


	2. Day 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear this has a plot, lol.
> 
> The end of this chapter is a bit saucy, but it's nothing that warrants an E rating I don't think? (Yet)

Sometime during the morning of Day 20, Robin sends Steve a text message. It reads:

_incoming milf ETA 2 mins_

The ping of the notification reverberates right next to his ear; he’d fallen asleep with his phone under his pillow. Steve jerks awake, his nerves jangling like chimes, eyes blinking at the offensively bright square of the screen hovering inches away from his nose.

 _Fuck off, I’m sleeping_ , he replies. _Also, don’t drive drunk._

He can feel Robin’s psychic eyeroll from over four miles away. She fires back:

_a) i sobered up as soon as Leon took off his shirt_

_b) im not the one u should be fuckign STEEB_

Steve pulls a face; is she implying what he thinks she’s implying? _You’re actually disgusting_ , he types out. Then he follows up with the age-old question: _Why are we friends again?_

_bc dumplings + free wine_

“Get fucked,” Steve says to the darkness of his bedroom. Then he puts the phone down, rolls over, and falls back asleep. He’s still unconscious when Karen Wheeler arrives, flipping over his welcome mat to access the spare key he’d completely forgotten to remove from underneath, telling himself that he’d do it on a day when he’s less tired.

Steve dreams uneasy, restless dreams, tossing and turning to the sound of a woman laughing, a man’s deep voice, and the distant rumble of a cement mixer. At midday, he gives up on trying to sleep through the noise altogether and pushes the bedcovers back. His glasses are sitting on the nightstand next to an ashtray of butted cigarettes; Steve slides them onto his nose, then brushes the ashtray and its accompanying detritus into his palm.

“Steve!” He finds Karen in the kitchen, presiding over a large jug and a row of empty glasses. Instead of slippers, she’s wearing her kitten heels; in place of tears, she’s smiling and spray tanned, her hair done in bouncy pageant curls. “I was just about to come and wake you up—long shift?”

“I went out,” Steve says. His tongue tastes like a dirty carpet. God Almighty, what the fuck had been in that bottle he and Robin had shared last night? “Listen, Karen—you can’t—”

“Do you ever take some time off for yourself, honey? I mean, you work six nights a week at the bar, and then you go out on your night off—”

Steve raises his voice. “I don’t need you mothering me,” he says. Before he has time to congratulate himself for this small show of defiance, his stomach gives a queasy lurch; he staggers to the sink, the night before flying back at him like the slivered shards of a debauched whole. They’d had dumplings at Lucy’s, a hole-in-the-wall establishment on Mulberry Street. Leon, Steve’s boss, had set a limit of twenty dollars per person, and they’d feasted like kings on spring rolls, Chinese greens, xaio long bao, and salt and pepper squid. There’d been beers, too, and wine and rum and cider, although Steve’s never liked cider all that much; it’s too sweet. The red wine, on the other hand, had gone through him like water. Dear God. No wonder his head aches like an impacted tooth.

“Oh, sweetie,” Karen coos. She’s dropping plastic cocktail umbrellas into each of the glasses; he notices that she’s taken the time to paint her nails. The dark red color makes her fingers look like they’ve been dipped in blood. “You don’t look so good.”

“And you look great,” he retorts. “Who’s all that for? Ted?”

He watches her profile carefully in the glass of the window above the sink: a slight pursing of her lips, a fidgety hand tugging at the halter straps of her sundress. “Ted’s at home,” Karen says. Her voice is falsely bright, cheery. “Ted’s _always_ home.”

“Has he checked your mail yet?” he asks. The hand tugging at her halter straps curls into a fist, her painted nails digging into her palm like bear claws. “Karen. You can’t keep coming here. Nancy—”

“Nancy’s not talking to me.” Karen smiles widely; Steve can see the spit gathered at the corners of her mouth, the smudges of pink lipstick on her teeth. It’s a fixed, uncomfortable smile, like that of a rubber mask; it doesn’t sit right on her face. “I can take a hint.”

“Why isn’t she talking to you?” His stomach turns with every word that leaves his mouth, but he has to say it. He has to make her _understand_ , otherwise she’ll go on using the spare key under his welcome mat like there isn’t a problem. “Karen. _Mrs. Wheeler_. How long are you gonna keep this up, huh? Are you really going to miss out on—”

“Nancy was the one who burned that bridge, not me,” she snaps, high spots of color appearing in her cheeks. Then, quick as the wind, her expression changes; the next smile she gives him is softer, warmer. “Now, can I get you some lemonade? It’s good for upset stomachs.”

“Just one.” Steve was planning on following his usual morning routine—milk in the bowl first, then cereal on top, followed by a cigarette in bed—but the idea of having dairy when his insides feel so volatile gives him pause. He wonders if he’s still drunk. He hopes he is; he’d rather be drunk than face the reality that this—nursing the migraine to end all migraines, Karen Wheeler pressing a frosted glass into his hand, no girlfriend to speak of—is his life now. “Is this from the same recipe?”

“Exactly the same,” she says. Ice cubes rattle as she holds her own glass up to the light. “Cheers!”

Steve echoes her unenthusiastically and rests the glass of lemonade against his tender, too-warm temple. The liquid inside is a perfect pale yellow, the same color of the lemon tree the Wheelers planted next to the porch when they first moved in. In the late afternoons he and Nancy would nest there, like two turtledoves. Steve looks out at his own backyard, reduced to a trench of churned soil and plastic grass on Day 2, and wonders if the lemon tree is still standing. If Jonathan sits with Nancy in his lap, now, listening to the branches creak and rustle, the sky grow thick with flies and the secrets that Nancy drew in the dirt with her bare toe, a lover’s language that only they—Nancy and Steve, Steve and Nancy, or so he thought—had been able to understand.

“These are store-bought lemons, I’m afraid,” Karen says. Steve doesn’t want to look at her; at this angle, in this light, the resemblance to Nancy will be too obvious, like two photographs superimposed over one another. “Do you remember all those summers we spent on the back porch? You, me, Ted, Nancy—”

“Mrs. Wheeler,” he says.

“—Mike as well, when he wasn’t slinking off to his room.” The way Karen talks over him is ruthless, determined. “We had some good times, didn’t we?”

There it is, Steve thinks tiredly. He lowers the lemonade from his temple; he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t need it.

It’s not easy to watch someone cry and do nothing about it, but somehow, he manages. Maybe that makes him a monster, the fact that he’s able to stand there and let Karen Wheeler shed tears in his kitchen; maybe that means he deserved it. These are the questions he still asks himself, three years later: did he move too fast? Did he pressure Nancy to love him, to dive into a relationship she wasn’t ready for? If he’d rejected his father’s offer earlier, would she have been able to wait for him? Was there anything he could’ve done differently, any magic words that he could’ve said to prevent her from leaving?

“She doesn’t know what she’s _doing_ to herself, Steve,” Karen bursts out. “I have nothing against Joyce Byers, you know that. But—but Jonathan, he’s just like Ted, you know, he has no spine, no _ambition_ —”

“Nancy does know,” he says. “She wouldn’t have—wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t. She made her choice. I think it’s a good one, Mrs. Wheeler.”

“ _Karen_ , Steve, call me Karen, _please._ For God’s sake, you’re like a son to me.”

“What do you want me to do?” Steve demands, finally losing some of his patience. “Yell out ‘I object’ when she walks up to the altar?”

Karen’s face drains of all color. For an uncertain, teetering moment, he thinks she’s going to collapse into hysterics again, or start screaming at him. He’s prepared for it, telling himself that he’s not at all sorry. Even though he _is_ sorry; he’s so sorry it hurts.

“Oh, to hell with it,” he hears Karen sighing. “Maybe I’ll ditch Ted and find myself a nice Spanish man for the wedding. Americans have no manners.”

Steve makes an undignified noise in the back of his throat. They’re back at square one: Ted and Karen, Karen and Ted. He bites his tongue, reluctant to give her an opening. Karen’s not looking at him, thank God. She’s looking past him, out at what’s left of his backyard, twirling a lock of hair around her finger and then letting it go. Several things fall into place then: her heavily done eyes, the lipstick on her teeth, the effort she’d gone to make the lemonade from scratch. She’s watching the workers next door. The men in their orange vests and hard hats. They’re definitely all men—Steve’s already made sure. He watches them too, but only when he knows he’s alone. When he knows nobody will see him—

A loud _bang!_ of something hitting the window almost causes Steve to spill lemonade all over himself. Heart in his mouth, he looks up to see a hand splayed over the glass. Behind this hand is a face, and blue, blue eyes crinkled at the corners. Glib, devil-may-care. Perpetually amused.

“Fucker,” Steve growls.

He knows Billy can hear him through the glass. Instead of remorse, Billy offers him a faint, floating grin; he looks like a cross between a naughty schoolboy and a cruising shark. Steve’s fingers tighten around his lemonade, his only weapon. His initial shock is fading, morphing into dark, thundering outrage—outrage at being seen, caught by surprise. Below that is another emotion that will never see the light of day: a secret, illicit thrill. Billy _saw_ him.

A flurry of noise engulfs the inside of the kitchen as the back door opens: men shouting, an incredible orchestra of electric saws and drilling. Today they’re tearing up Steve’s driveway, for whatever fucking reason. It could be that they have a permit; it could also be that they just want to fuck with him. Because Steve’s apparently offended some unseen, outside force, some universal powers-that-be—it’s the only explanation he can think of for Karen latching onto him, for Nancy sending _two_ wedding invites as if to rub salt in the wound, for his Wi-Fi getting cut off on Day 3 and still not working despite the numerous phone calls he’s made to his provider. His parking space— _the_ parking space that’s included in his monthly rent—no longer exists, thanks to the powers-that-be. Steve now parks the BMW two blocks away—illegally, mind you—hoping all the while that it doesn’t come back to bite him in the ass.

“Thanks for the ice, Mrs—or is it Miss …?”

“You cheeky thing! You know I’m married,” Karen exclaims, laughing and flapping her hands. Billy closes the door, dampening the noise somewhat, and immediately catches Steve’s eye.

“Knock, knock,” he says softly. “Honey, I’m home.”

He lifts his hand to his mouth and pops something between his lips: an ice cube, undoubtedly taken from the automatic dispenser attached to Steve’s fridge. The tattoos on Billy’s neck ripple as he grinds the ice between his molars, lending them a hypnotic, life-like quality. _Fucker_.

“I’m going back to bed,” Steve says to Karen. Wiping his chin, rearranging his features into a scowl, crossing his arms. He is disdainful, apathetic. He doesn’t care that Billy is standing in his kitchen; he doesn’t care one whit about Billy’s mouth. Caring, he’s quickly learned, is all a person like Billy wants from him. Steve cares by reacting, whether it be positive or negative; he cares by showing weakness. It’s the reason Billy keeps coming back, day after day, like a rash, an overgrown stray: the more you feed or scratch it, the worse it gets.

“Again? Steve, are you sure that’s a good idea? Billy was just telling me that excessive napping during the daytime is probably the reason you have insomnia in the first place—”

“I didn’t ask, Mrs. Wheeler. Really.” Steve’s doctor had told him the same thing, but he’d rather staple his fingers together than admit that with Billy in earshot.

“You know, I’m struggling to see the resemblance,” Billy says. He takes a step forwards, aiming the brunt of his smile at Karen. “Are you his sister?”

Karen lets out a deranged giggle. _Fucker, fucker, fucker_ , Steve thinks, hating them both. “Did you think I was?” Karen simpers, playing with her hair again. “I’m just his neighbor, but I’ll take it as a compliment.”

“ _Ex-_ neighbor,” Steve corrects. “She’s my ex-neighbor.”

“Prickly, aren’t you?” Billy slides another ice cube into his mouth and crunches on it delightedly, as if feasting on Steve’s suffering. The sound of his tongue smacking against his teeth is almost as deafening as the bulldozers outside.

“He always is, after a big night.” Karen frowns at Steve gravely, the same way you might frown at a puppy that’s just piddled on the floor. “See, this is why you can’t overwork yourself, honey. You’re clearly unhappy.”

Steve says loudly, “Mrs. Wheeler, I didn’t _ask_ —”

“Where do you work?” Billy interrupts. His eyes are wide and round, looking—for the first time since Steve met him—genuinely interested in the proceedings. Flustered, Steve lets his arms fall loosely to his sides, before remembering that he’s supposed to be above it all. He crosses his arms back over his chest.

“He bartends at the Hideaway,” Karen jumps in, too quickly for Steve to stop her in time. “Are you local, Billy? It’s just off Mulberry Street. I’ll tell you what I always tell my girlfriends: Steve makes the best Cosmopolitans in the state, and he—”

“I don’t drink,” Billy says flatly. His head tilts back in Steve’s direction. “The boys might like to check it out, though.”

“The ‘boys’?” Steve repeats, all derision. Billy ignores him.  

“Thanks again, Mrs. Wheeler. You’re a real lifesaver, you know that?”

“Oh, call me Karen, Billy. Or don’t call me at all.” She lets out another deranged, sick giggle, tottering slightly as she straightens up; Steve’s starting to think she might have spiked her lemonade with something stronger. Something like the bottle of Guyanan rum that Robin gave him at last year’s Christmas party. “Your building manager wouldn’t be opposed if I happened to pay his workers a visit with some refreshments, would he?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t think he’d be opposed to that at all. Do you, uh, need any help with that, or—”

“No, no. I’m fine. Make yourself at home,” Karen says, beaming at them both. She’s loading the glasses and jug of lemonade onto a tray, lifting it upwards and balancing it expertly onto her hip. One high-heeled foot kicks the back door open; the other pushes it closed behind her.

“Is she always like that?” Billy’s voice makes him jump; he’d moved closer when Steve was distracted, past the middle island where Karen had been squeezing her store-bought lemons. Steve’s kitchen, already small enough to begin with, has now tapered to about three feet of space between them. The smell of lemon juice is sour, electric, and strangely pleasing in combination with Billy’s smell—it can only be Billy’s smell, Steve thinks—leathery and musky and warm, like freshly turned earth.

“Like what?” he says.

“You know. Like—” Out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees Billy circle his ear with his finger, lips pursed to make a shrill, Tweety-Bird whistle: crazy town. _Loco_ , they used to say when Steve was in middle school.

“She’s just going through a rough spot,” he says. “Look, I’m sorry, but—but don’t you have somewhere to _be_?”

“Whoa.” Billy lifts his hands and takes a step back. His palms are stark and white, like the underbellies of trout. “I’ve been on the clock since six, Harrington. Think I deserve a break, don’t you?”

He turns back around, heavy work boots leaving a trail of gravel behind him as he circles the middle island, dragging his finger along the speckled surface. His eyes scan Steve’s walls, the bookshelf he hardly uses, the stacks of dirty dishes, the wet laundry languishing a wicker basket on top of the TV. Steve feels a prickling of shame; he should’ve cleaned up when he got home this morning. He doesn’t want Billy to think he’s some kind of hoarder. Damn it, why didn’t he think to clean up?

“No,” he says peevishly; Billy decides to hoist himself onto the table anyway. “Hey, you can’t—”

“Humor me, Harrington,” Billy says, unzipping his safety vest and drawing it off his shoulders. “Why do you hate me?”

“Hate you? I don’t—” Steve takes a deep, calming breath; he only stutters when he’s nervous, and he can’t stutter in front of Billy, or allow him to guess that he might be nervous. “I don’t _hate_ you, I just—I don’t like your music taste.”

( _Wow, Harrington,_ he hears Tommy’s voice whisper. _Like a ninja, you are._ )

“No?” Billy snorts. “What do you like, then? Sara Bareilles? The fucking Beatles? Let me guess, you’re the type of guy who only listens to _real_ music.”

“ ‘Hey Jude’ is a classic.”

“It’s a cliché. You’re not that predictable, Harrington. I know you’re not.”

There’s a loud ripping of Velcro. Billy tears open a flap in the breast pocket of his vest and tips a white pump bottle into his hand: _50+ Protection_ , the label reads. Is he paying Steve a compliment, or insulting him to his face? Seeing as Billy does both with a smile, the line between the two is blurred at best. It makes Steve’s head hurt.

“You don’t know me,” he says. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Billy bares the tips of his teeth over his lower lip. “I know you don’t hate me, allegedly,” he says, flicking open the cap of the sunscreen and squeezing a dollop onto his palm, “You just don’t like my music taste. That’s the politest ‘fuck you’ I’ve ever heard.”

“I don’t see why it matters to you.”

“It doesn’t. Trust me, I’ve had more people tell me to go fuck myself than you can imagine.”

“Oh, I can imagine.”

Billy’s lips stretch further back. His teeth loom from the hollow of his mouth, white and perfectly square as painted fence pickets. That makes Steve’s head hurt, too. He can’t decide if it’s a smile that’s hungry, malicious, or smug. The lines are blurred, gone soft and bendable like taffy. He’s lost track of time.

Then, out of nowhere, Billy asks, “Can you do my back?”

Steve freezes. An inkling of déjà vu, a _where have I heard that before_ pushing at the trapdoor of his subconscious, crying out for relief—suddenly it’s Tommy, not Billy, sitting at his one-man table, Tommy talking with that subliminally sly tone, _hey, King, you wanna do my back?—_ but only for a second. He’s able to push back, burying Tommy and the pool and the boys’ toilets back beneath a layer of static. Nothing to see here, folks. Keep movin’.

“You’re gonna have to stand up,” he says.

“Maybe,” Billy says, eyelashes fluttering. His hand slaps the sunscreen onto his arm, spreading and rubbing it into his sunbrowned skin, his tattoos, turning the darker colors a filmy gray. “Maybe you should get on your knees.”

( _beer is fine_ )

Through the window, Steve can see Karen standing in the midst of a sea of safety orange, handing out glasses of lemonade like they’re cookies on Halloween night. She’s in her element: charming and being charmed, wanted and needed, the center of attention—a far cry from the treatment she receives at home.

Steve is not charming. In fact, it’s hard for him to believe he ever was; he is dirty and inadequate, threadbare shirt clinging to his unwashed armpits, sweatpants spotty with food stains and—although he can’t be sure, given that so much of last night was a total wipeout—puke. Is this what letting yourself go is supposed to look like? He’s not fat—no one would ever call Steve Harrington fat—but he carries weight. Not a _physical_ weight per se, but a weight of the soul, curving his spine, hunching his shoulders. He doesn’t care about his appearance as much as he used to. But he should. _King_ , they called him. Would they still think him kingly, if they saw him now?

( _but whiskey is quicker_ )

The legs of the table scrape unpleasantly against the floor as Billy pushes it back, lumbering slowly to his feet. He looks like he wants to laugh; he looks like he might already be laughing at Steve somehow, the corners of his eyes crinkled skyward.

The innuendo is about as subtle as a dinner plate to the head.

“Are you okay, Harrington?” Billy says. “You seem kind of … antsy.”

“I’m—I’m fine.” Steve’s voice comes out as a cracking, sheepish gasp, as if held between a clenched fist. Surely Billy can hear how hard his heart is pounding; he’s standing close enough. “Just—hold still, would you?”

He expects dissent, but Billy merely relaxes his shoulders into a slouch and sweeps his hair to one side, off his neck. Steve takes the sunscreen from him and pushes it open with fingers that feel as though they’ve turned to water; he can’t believe he’s letting himself do this. On the back of Billy’s neck is an image he remembers well from childhood nightmares—that of the bobble-headed, red-eyed extraterrestrials from _Mars Attacks!_ , its raygun held aloft in homicidal reenactment: _Ack! Ack! Ack!_ Steve applies sunscreen liberally over the tattoo, his mind adrift, wondering if this means Billy likes science fiction movies. Or parodies of them.

“You have a scar,” he says.

“What?” Billy sounds distracted, almost sleepy. A curl of blonde hair falls from his fist, sticking to the moisture on Steve’s hand. He hesitates, then brushes it away; it’s as soft as he thought it would be.

“On your shoulder.”

His fingers aren’t quite spreading the sunscreen anymore; they’ve graduated to kneading, feeling, cataloguing the sensation of ridged skin, pockmarks, half-healed lesions and bumps. Midwesterners are cold-blooded—not enough sun, too much rain, pale-skinned and dark-eyed. Billy, on the other hand, is warm. Warm like an overheated engine, like the sidewalk in summer, burning the soles of your bare feet; everything about him screams outsider, deviant, stranger danger.

“Oh.” Billy’s shoulders perk up slightly. “I had a tumor cut out. Melanoma. It coulda been worse,” he adds, not missing Steve’s startled intake of breath, “we lose a few guys to cancer every couple of years. It’s not unheard of, not when you’re spending fifty, sixty hours a week in the sun. Had another tumor, here,” he half-turns, gesturing to his left nostril, then down to the underside of his right arm, “a third here. Twelve stitches in all.”

“You ever considered a desk job, man?”

Billy sticks his tongue out. “Are you kidding? An office job would actually kill me. Never liked bein’ in one place for too long.”

As if to demonstrate, Billy lets go of his hair and stretches his arms over his head, rolling his shoulder blades until they crack thinly. Steve doesn’t move his hands, marveling the feel of a body in its prime. Billy either doesn’t notice his lingering touch, or he doesn’t care. Steve has a feeling that he’s used to being touched like this, admired and—what’s the word? _Caressed_ , like a sculpture on display in a gallery. Who would do the caressing? Women? He wants to say yes, but Billy’s personal grooming tells another story. Steve’s never met a straight man which such obviously plucked eyebrows.

“Turn around,” he orders.

Still without protest, Billy faces him. Steve resolutely avoids making eye contact and squeezes out more sunscreen into his palm. Billy’s chest is a swarming patchwork of tattoos; there are so many of them it’s almost impossible to tell where the ink ends and his natural skin color is supposed to begin. Steve sees an ace of spades, a pinup devil with ample breasts and a forked tongue, a portrait of Marlon Brando, and a woman’s face—the same woman he thought was the Virgin Mary. She’s posed similarly to the figures he’s seen in church, with pious sadness welling in her eyes, although her hair is a curly, sandy blonde. An ex-girlfriend, maybe? A _wife_? Probably, knowing Steve’s luck; if what Robin says is true and everyone has a type, then his must be those who are eternally unavailable.

“What are you doing?” Billy asks.

Steve pauses, fingers tacky with sunscreen. He’s staring, face inches away from Billy’s chest, at the smattering of freckles connecting the Marlon Brando portrait to his collarbone. They’re lighter than Tommy’s, but they’re there. “Um. Putting sunscreen on you?”

Billy starts to laugh. The sound arcs up to Steve’s ceiling, deep, booming, and not entirely unwelcome. In fact, Steve could get used to it. “Gee, thanks, Harrington, but I don’t need your help with the front,” he says, running his tongue over his lips. “I can do it myself just fine.”

“I-I wasn’t—” Tell-tale heat crawls up the back of Steve’s neck; he knows he’s blushing. _Sit up straight!_ his dad would tell him, but that only served to make him more nervous. “I was just—”

Billy leans forwards, breath hot on Steve’s face as he gently takes the sunscreen from him. The kitchen seems smaller than ever, tunnel-like. The last time he was this close to another man’s body, he was fourteen, and Tommy was smirking at him through a thick veil of shower steam. Steve would sit in the back row of every class they had together, waiting for the moment when Tommy would shift in his seat and he’d glimpse the freckles on the small of his back. The other boys teased Tommy for them, called him names like _shitface_ and _moley_ , but it never occurred to Steve to do the same. He liked Tommy’s freckles. Liked watching them disappear underneath his briefs like a trail of breadcrumbs every time he peeled Tommy’s jeans open, liked hearing Tommy’s high, exalted sigh: _fuck, don’t stop._

Billy rubs the sunscreen where Steve didn’t, could never dare to, not in a million years: over his pectorals, his nipples. Steve stares helplessly, his chest tight and agonized, as Billy pinches at one nipple until it stiffens, turning even more luridly pink under the warmth of his hand. Swallowing hard, Steve looks up. Billy’s smiling triumphantly, his eyes turned up at the corners. Like he knows. Like he _sees._

Still smiling, one hand ghosting, teasing at his nipple, Billy says, “Do you want to touch my front?”

Steve bristles. Furious with Billy for having the audacity to name it aloud, furious at himself for being so—so—what, exactly? _Transparent_? All because he’s tired of waking up alone, entertaining parading, invasive thoughts of Nancy and who she might be with—jealous of Jonathan for having the luxury, the fucking _privilege_?

“No need,” he says, mustering a sneer. “I bet you touch yourself enough already, don’t you?” He leans in, licks his lips in a subconscious imitation of Billy, and says in a lower voice, “I bet you like giving that massive ego a nice, _good_ stroke.”

He’s met with more of that musical, booming laughter. Billy’s hand is warm and brotherly when it claps him on the back, but the crinkle at the corners of his eyes is gone, replaced by a steely, guarded edge. Like a crooked bedspring that sticks you in the back when you roll over; a painful reminder that Steve can’t get too comfortable.

“There’s some fire in you after all, huh?” Billy leers, teeth still bared. “I’m only makin’ the most of what my mama gave me, Harrington.”

Just like that, the hand digging into his shoulder is gone. Billy balls the vest into his back pocket and saunters—he does not walk, he saunters—over to Steve’s back door, unlatching it with an ease that suggests he’s lived there his whole life. Leaving Steve with an unmistakable feeling that he’s lost something, or given it away.

As soon as Billy closes the door behind him, Steve’s entire body sags.

“What the fuck.”

He bends over, hugging his knees with his arms, feeling himself sink further towards the ground. He’s on the verge of toppling over, the linoleum floor swaying crazily in front of his eyes. His stomach growls unhappily, his gorge threatening to rise; then, with frustrating slowness, it abates.

“What the fuck. What the fuck, what the fuck.”

Steve puts a hand to his cheek, cool with drying sweat. He can smell sunscreen on his fingers, beachy coconut and zinc. He can smell Billy, the soil and sweat that’s permeated his kitchen. More sweat trickles down his back, coating the insides of his thighs. He feels winded, achy and heavy and feverish with aborted need, angry with it.

“What are you doing, Harrington? Huh?” he hisses. “Snap out of it.”

He places his palms flat on his knees, forcing his spine to straighten at the waist. His reflection stares back at him in the window above the sink like a frightened Angora rabbit, white-faced and trembling.

“You love her,” he says. Three years ago, those words had been the absolute truth. Steve’s never wanted anyone else. He hadn’t _needed_ anyone else. Now the words sound like a question, not a statement: _do you, really? Really, really?_

He nods briskly at his reflection, as if they’ve come to an agreement. As if that’s the end of it.

“Fuck.” He whirls around, irate. “ _Fuck._ ”

He leans over the sink, hands clawing at the countertop, and waits for the retching to start. The window has turned into a blazing square of light—a safety orange kind of light—in his periphery. He wants to throw up, to puke his guts out until he feels clean again, but he can’t. He’s angry, tense, heavy. Desire rolling over him in dark purple thunderclouds, shot through with silent veins of lightning. One brilliant, powerful flash, illuminating the scene like a photographer’s bulb: he sees Tommy as he was, freckled and stocky, chlorine pooled at his feet. The shadows of the other boys moving in the gap underneath the door of the stall, blissfully unaware.

It takes a moment for Steve to realize that his right hand has moved from the sink, and is now flattened against the crotch of his sweatpants. His knees bump against the cabinets. He’s staring straight through the window, out into his fenceless driveway, and he’s hard. He’s been hard ever since Day 1, it feels like. He shouldn’t be—he really fucking _shouldn’t be._

But he is.

With his free hand, Steve loosens the drawstring of his sweats, pushing them down his hips. He cups himself gently at first, testing, then tightens his grip when he feels moisture start to seep through his underwear. He’s already close; he wouldn’t even need to slide his hand all the way into his Calvins. He could rut against the cupboards, using the pressure of his palm to get over the finish line. Billy left his back door unlatched; anyone could walk in, if they wanted to. What would Billy say, if he saw Steve standing there, playing pocket pool with himself? What would he do? _Harrington, right?_

Oh.

It’s perverse, far beyond the realm of what usually turns him on. Steve’s lips part, and before he knows it, he’s pushing his thumb into his mouth, hips twitching. It’s not Tommy he sees in the stall of the boys’ toilets anymore. _Oh, oh, oh._ He thinks of Billy’s tongue, Billy’s pink fucking tongue sucking on his fingers, his cock. _Harrington, right?_ Fuck, Steve’s never going to get that voice out of his head. It occurs to him that Billy might like saying his name, that Billy gets off on it somehow, and then his hand speeds up, moving at a wild, abrasive pace over his underwear, knees knocking rhythmically against the cabinets.

“Oh, God,” he whimpers. “Oh my fucking God—”

Steve, for lack of a better word, explodes in his pants. Floods his underwear like he’s fourteen again, watching Sharon Stone uncross her legs in _Basic Instinct_ on the forbidden VCR in his dad’s basement. Open-mouthed, he collapses against the sink, not even feeling the sting as his elbow collides with the sharp edge of the counter; his knees are shaking, shocked pleasure coursing up the backs of his thighs. He jerks once, twice, his hand pressed over his crotch.

“Should ask Hargrove. I swear that guy’s as smooth as a fucking seal.”

His eyes fly open.

“Hey, Hargrove!” the same voice—the voice of a figure moving beyond the glass of his window, fuzzy, indiscriminate. They’re standing less than ten feet away, an older man and a younger one, but they don’t seem to realize that he’s there. “HARGROVE!”

“ _What_?” Billy’s voice, coming from above. Steve pushes his hair out of his eyes and stands at the edge of the light, looking out. Now he sees Billy crouching in the center of a high-standing scaffold that arches through the trees. Billy’s not looking at his window, but Steve’s breath stalls at the possibility that he’d been close enough to do so the whole time.

“Dale’s missus wants him to wax his back for her birthday. You got any tips?”

A burst of male laughter follows, but Billy doesn’t laugh along with them. Billy is silent, somber as he pushes himself to his feet. He takes a moment to lick his lips, teeth showing in another unspoken threat. Then he says, “I like to wax all over. It makes me more aerodynamic when I fuck.”

Laser sharp, his gaze cuts straight through Steve’s window. Steve stands unmoving, paralyzed from the waist up. His thumb is half-crooked inside his mouth, the fingers of his left hand poised around the cord of his window blinds, ready to pull the trigger.

Music swells from the construction site at an ear-bleeding level; Destiny’s Child are singing _I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly, I don’t think you’re ready for this_ and Steve happens to know that it’s Billy’s personal iTunes library that’s playing, because Billy’s music taste is something he’s been subjected to every day for the last three weeks: a gonzo mix of swampy grunge rock, British thrash metal, and slow burn RnB. There is no middle ground—either Steve’s wading through the entire discography of Iron Maiden, or he’s forced to relive what sounds like every Top 40 hit from the year 2001. On repeat. It’s bizarre.

As he watches, Billy lifts one leg, swings it over the railing and, in perfect synchronization with the music, starts humping the air. He’s grinning from ear to ear, his eyes burning. If looks could kill.

Steve closes his blinds.


	3. Day 40 and a poker game

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The process of writing this chapter was frustrating to say the least. I owe a very special thanks to Jackie aka [xJuniperx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xJuniperx/pseuds/xJuniperx) for the virtual handholding and for being such a steadfast, comforting presence in my inbox in times of need; I would also like to thank LazyBaker for their story [Cherry](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16516235/chapters/38685479), from which the image of Billy wearing a scrunchie is happily seared onto my brain forevermore.

Come day 40, Steve is living in semi-delirium.

His comfortable isolation from the rest of the world, the routine he has curated for himself after years of living under his father’s thumb, has been compromised, unceremoniously dissembled and invaded.

That’s how he’s starting to see Billy’s presence in his life: as an invasion of his dreams, his waking thoughts. It’s not just the noise, or the fact that three quarters of his street is now blocked off by trucks and signs proclaiming PEDESTRIANS USE OPPOSITE SIDEWALK; it’s not just the pounding music that roars to life at seven o’clock and continues without reprieve until the late afternoon, constant, catastrophic. It’s the fact that Steve feels drugged. He is discombobulated, not himself. He can’t sleep, he can’t get anything done; the Steve he was yesterday doesn’t feel like the Steve he is today. His ears are either waterlogged or stuffed with cotton wool; say something to him, and he will look at you like he barely knows you.

Billy hasn’t turned up on his doorstep or appeared in his window since Day 20, but Steve’s awareness of him is always present. A prickling on the back of his neck, a feeling of being watched. A blurry shape in the corner of his eye. He’s stopped playing hide-and-seek with the window blinds, and instead keeps them drawn all day long to starve himself of the temptation. The distracting smell of lemons persists in his kitchen, despite his best efforts to air it out; his hands are still tacky, as if phantom remnants of sunscreen cling to them.

On Day 40, nearly two months after Billy turned up on his doorstep, Steve wakes up terrified, not knowing where he is. It’s his first episode of sleep paralysis in nearly a decade; he can’t see anything, his eyes are jammed shut with sleep, and the only sound that issues from his throat when he tries to speak is a low, strangled gurgle. He’s positive that there’s something in his room, draped over the end of his bed. It’s sitting with its paws tucked under its chin, and it’s dead. There’s blood pooled on the sheets in macabre butterfly wings, spattering his legs, drenching the pillow. Steve had been _sleeping_ in it.

He rolls over, unlocking his phone and dialing the number to Hawkins Medical Center. The concerned receptionist recognizes his voice, even in its slurry, half-vegetative state; she transfers him through to Dr. O’Connell, who picks up on the second ring.

“Deep breath, Steve. Tell me what you saw.”

Steve sits up, keeping his eyes locked on the shape at the end of the bed. It’s only his work uniform, he knows that. Of course he knows. It’s there because he is, despite Billy’s efforts to uproot his life, a creature of habit; every morning when he gets home, he’ll stagger into bed and leave his dirty clothes on the end of the mattress. That way, he remembers to wash them.

“Tommy’s dog,” he says. “He had this seven year old Border Collie. She had a patch of white fur over her eye, so he called her Patches.”

Dr. O’Connell makes a distant, appraising sound. “I remember. Sweet animal. Awful, what happened to her.”

“Y-yeah. Awful,” Steve says. His throat closes over the word like a vice, sucking it back into his chest with a faint _pop_ of air.

There’s silence on the other end of the line, as if O’Connell’s waiting for him to keep talking. When Steve stays quiet, the good doctor says bracingly, “Did something happen to trigger these memories of the dog, Steve?”

“No,” Steve says, but he can feel the sensation returning to his body even as he says it, bit by bit; there’s a foul-tasting residue at the corners of his mouth, a specific ache in his joints. His head feels like it’s been whacked repeatedly with a cartoon mallet: swollen and pounding with trapped blood. “Yes.”

Dr. O’Connell makes another noise of thoughtful consideration, as if Steve’s a pumpkin he’s sizing up at the county fair. “Tell me.”

Yes, Steve says haltingly, he’d gone out last night, but not to work; he’d gone on a date. The clothes at the end of his bed aren’t his work clothes, but the polo and jeans he’d laundered and ironed precisely for said date. What had happened after that? O’Connell asks. Steve says he’d woken up in an empty bed, which means that, most likely, it hadn’t worked out. Oh, _God_ , what if he’d spent the evening getting drunk and talking about Nancy? O’Connell presses him for greater detail, asking him _is that what you think happened? How likely is it?_ Steve’s memory continues to fire blanks, but he says it’s possible. He’s done it before: gone to the effort of wooing a girl, and then bungled his chances in spectacular fashion by drinking too much, too early.

“Do you think you have a drinking problem, Steve?”

The question takes him by surprise. “A—what? No, not at all.”

The words are flat, spoken far too quickly to be natural or even believable. Steve doesn’t have a drinking problem, though. If he does, then everybody else who works at the Hideaway would fall into that same category. Robin likes to joke that all bartenders are high-functioning alcoholics; it’s part of the ‘ _work culture_ ’ _._

“How often do you drink to excess?”

“To—to excess?”

“Until you black out,” Dr. O’Connell clarifies.

“Like, once a week. Listen, Perry—”

“Is that _every_ week?”

“Once in a while,” Steve huffs, irritated. “Anyway, that’s not why I called. I was just wondering if there’s anything I can do, you know, in case—”

“Sunlight,” Dr. O’Connell says at once. “Lots of it. Water, too. A healthy, balanced diet. Can’t go wrong with any of those.”

“I—I meant, if there’s anything you can give me on like—like a prescription basis—”

“Well, of course I can do that for you, Steve. I can put you on benzodiazepines, SSRIs, anti-psychotics. It would be very _easy_ for me to do that for you, easier than you think. We are one of the most highly medicated countries in the world, after all. Maybe I would, if I had reason to believe that you need them. Right now, though, I don’t have that. I don’t think you’re sick. Depressed, yes, but your depression arises from your circumstances. It’s a symptom of a larger problem, but it’s not the cause.”

“…What about melatonin?” Steve asks hopefully.

“Melatonin.” The connection grows fuzzy as Dr. O’Connell sighs, audibly shifting the receiver from one shoulder to the other. “How about this, Steve—you come in for a blood test, so we can see if you have any deficiencies that can be addressed with a hormone supplement. We can even talk about possible sleep hygiene strategies if you like, but you already know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

“That I need to find another job, and go for a fifteen-minute walk every day?”

“I keep tellin’ people that it’s the key to eternal youth, but they never believe me,” Dr. O’Connell says. “Well. You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

“Yeah. I’ve got you on speed dial,” Steve jokes. O’Connell laughs politely at that, but it sounds a little forced over the phone, a little like Steve’s overstayed his welcome. It’s a strange relief when he gets hung up on, although the feeling doesn’t last. He still has to go to work.

Twenty minutes later, Steve is reluctantly showered, dressed, and standing behind the bar, pouring tequila shots for three giggling thirty-somethings from the city. He knows they’re from the city because no Hawkins native orders a tequila shot before five o’clock, and because they’re each wearing Cartier bracelets that cost more than his yearly rent. One of them hands him a ten dollar tip in return for her drink; Steve waits until they’ve turned around and headed back to their table before unscrewing the cap of the tequila bottle, rewarding himself with a quick, refreshing splash of alcohol. He likes Perry O’Connell, but he’s also starting to think that the man’s approach to modern medicine is less medicinal, and more New Age hippie-dippie bullshit.

“Ah, ah, ah, I saw that. Your boss wouldn’t be too happy if he found you drinking on the job, would he?”

Billy Hargrove leans over the counter, watching Steve lower the tequila bottle with glittering beetle-leg eyes. The buttons of his gray Henley are undone, advertising the swirl of tattoos on his breastbone. Instead of hanging loose around his shoulders, his hair is off his face, gathered into the loudest, most obnoxious scrunchie Steve’s ever seen on anyone over the age of twelve. Somehow, though—true to form—Billy manages to make it look impossibly glamorous.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve says. Leon’s nowhere to be seen, but that doesn’t mean he’s not _around_ —there are still the security cameras positioned at the other end of the bar, watching over the POS machine. Just to be safe, Steve stows the tequila bottle inside the ice trough. “What is this, a special day for assholes?”

Billy favors him with an oily smirk. “I’ll have six Coronas and a cup of ice, please.” He glances behind him, then back around at Steve, his smirk lingering, turning malign. “What?”

“I thought you don’t drink.”

“I don’t. It disagrees with my sunny disposition.” Billy takes out his wallet and places two twenties onto the counter with an exaggerated flourish. “Five of the beers will need lime slices, by the way.”

Steve doesn’t move. “You got any I.D., Hargrove?”

“Hey, I’m the designated driver!”

“I still need to see your I.D. to serve you, man, sorry,” he says, and allows himself a small smile.

“You really need to work on your bedside manner,” grumbles Billy. His fingers are gilded with silver rings, two on his right hand, three stacked on his left; they catch the light as he shows Steve his driver’s license. Steve turns the license over, fascinated by the contrast between the boy in the photograph and the man standing in front of him. Billy must have been around seventeen when it was taken; he is rosy-cheeked and top-heavy, with a hairstyle that seems more bird’s nest than boy. There’s a definitive lack of tattoos and flamboyant jewelry, but the smile is the same: sly, all too self-aware. Exactly the kind of smile that mothers, and certain teachers, would call a _heartbreaker._

“What’s a Californian doing all the way out here in Hawkins, Indiana?” he asks. Privately noting the birth date stamped into the plastic: April 8, 1994. Steve was born in ’93, just under a year earlier.

“Employment’s a fickle mistress, Harrington. I’m not out here by choice.”

“Me neither,” he says, and holds the driver’s license out. Billy doesn’t take it back at first; instead, he cups his jaw with his palm, flicking his tongue out to run it over his lower lip—never a good sign. Steve can practically hear the rapid circuitry of his thoughts, humming like a nest of live wasps between his ears.

“Well, well, well,” Billy says. “This is interesting. You don’t like living here.” He pauses, then says with a sour chuckle, “You _hate_ it. Can’t say I blame ya.”

“That’ll be forty-two dollars for the beers,” Steve says airily, “and a dime for the cup of ice.”

Billy rears like an angry rattlesnake. “You fucking charge your customers for _ice_?”

“We charge for the plastic cup. Stocktake reasons, you know?”

“Bullshit. Bull _shit_. That’s daylight robbery, Harrington.”

“Hey, you wanna complain, you’re welcome to talk to the manager,” Steve says. “But his _bedside manner_ , or whatever, is even worse than mine, so. He’ll probably just end up kicking you out.”

“Jeez, whatever happened to your Midwestern hospitality?” Billy demands, with a put-upon sigh and a pout. “I don’t have any more cash. Can I start a tab?”

“Sure. Are you paying for all your friends?”

Billy glances carefully behind him, towards table 7 on the far side of the bar floor. Steve recognizes some of the faces from the construction site; he knows most of them by now. He’s watched them long enough through his window blinds to know them, how they sound when they laugh, the specific cadence of their speech, the names of their wives and children and pets. He knows other things, too; that is, he knows Billy never joins in on these conversations. Billy talks and talks and talks, but he never actually _says_ anything, and Steve’s wondered how many people have noticed that about him.

 “Fuck it,” Billy says, shooting the table a one-fingered salute to the sound of cheers, “I’m the designated driver, but let’s start a tab.”

“They’re gonna bleed you dry,” Steve says.

“Don’t I know it. You need me to sign anything, or—?”

“I just need your card and a form of identification.”

When Billy opens his wallet a second time, Steve sees another photograph tucked in the plastic window: clearly taken from a yearbook, it shows a girl of around thirteen or fourteen posed in a private school uniform, her fiery red hair tied into two _Anne of Green Gables_ -style braids. The metal wiring of her braces jut over her lower lip; she’s not quite smiling, but something in her expression conveys a familiar sense of smug hilarity, elfin and mischievous. He takes an instant liking to her.

“Is that your daughter?”

“Step-sister,” Billy says. “Miss Maxine Hargrove-Mayfield. Don’t let those sweet little chompers fool you—the brat bites, and is a proper pain in my ass.”

Steve has to laugh at the mental imagery. “Does she live in California?”

“She did, the last time I saw her. That photo was taken a while back. Now she’d be … shit, what year is it?”

“2016.”

“2016, fuck me. Yeah, that’s right. She’ll be turning eighteen this year,” Billy says, after a moment of uncharacteristic contemplation.

“You don’t see her?”

Billy’s scrunchie wags back and forth as he shakes his head. “We’re, uh … not as close as we used to be.”

“Oh. Sorry,” Steve says, blinking. He’s shocked to realize that he means it.

A slight shadow appears between Billy’s eyebrows. “Thanks,” he says, and the shadow elongates, swiftly closing in on the rest of his face, rendering his expression distant, unreadable. Before Steve can speak, he says abruptly, “You should probably get back to work.”

“Oh, uh—yeah,” Steve says, quietly baffled. The transition between Billy’s moods is as jarring as physical whiplash; it’s impossible to know if it’s something he said, or didn’t say, or should have said. “Uh, hey—I’ll bring the beers over to you. Table 7, yeah?”

Billy gives him a small nod, slipping off his bar stool with a poise that seems at odds with his size. Steve drops his gaze and kneels down, feeling under the counter for the big black tabs folder. He flips it open, busying himself with sliding Billy’s credit card and I.D. into the plastic pocket. “Harrington,” Billy’s voice says from above.

Steve hadn’t realized he was still there. He closes the tabs folder and, feigning detached professionalism, looks up. “Yeah?”

“You got somethin’ on your face.”

“Ah, shit—” Steve raises his hand, but Billy gets there first: licking his thumb and pressing it to the center of Steve’s forehead, gently rubbing. “What are you, my mom?”

“You’re welcome,” says Billy. He steps away from the bar, parting the crowd as he returns to his table. Steve rubs his forehead, the smell of lemons balled in his nostrils like a damp Kleenex. _Move_ , he reminds himself. _You’re at work. Leon is probably watching you on the cameras right now. Move, move, move._ His hand is still rubbing when Robin bustles in next to him, wrestling with the ties of her waitressing apron.

“Ugh, someone stole my nice apron so I had to borrow this from the staff room and it _literally_ smells like feet—who was that?”

Steve flinches from his reverie. “Who was what?”

“The guy you were just talking to. The lifesized Ken doll.”

“Oh. He’s—uh, he’s no one. Why are you so interested?”

She looks taken aback by his tone. “I’m not. It just seemed like you knew him.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Okay, _well_ , you were talking to him for a while—”

“Yeah, because he wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone,” Steve snaps, his voice rising more than necessary. Needing a distraction, his hand reaches for the closest item within range: the tub of cocktail limes next to the ice trough, sitting curiously empty. “Are there any more limes?”

“Leon said he was going to get more tomorrow,” Robin says, and he swears out loud. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Table 7 wanted limes with their Coronas. We don’t have any.”

“Then they can go without, or complain. Tough shit.” Giving up on the apron entirely, Robin focuses her attention sideways. “Steve, why are _you_ so interested?”

Steve stares at her, adrenaline—fear—spiking in his blood. His awareness of his surroundings fluctuates, like a radio frequency being tuned; all at once, it sharpens from a messy blur of noises and smells to the delicate, eyelet details: the line of his shoulders, how his hair looks in the reflection of the refrigerator door, whether anyone might be talking about him, judging him and criticizing him behind their hands. Seen. He feels too _seen._

“I’m not,” Steve says. “I just wish we’d have proper fucking stock when we need it. Some people like limes with their beers. I know I do.”

The doorway to the bar is gradually filling with people, but if Steve were to turn his head, he’d still be able to see Billy through the thickening mass of bodies. Laughing as one of his workmates leans over to ruffle his hair, tilting his head back to shake an ice cube into his mouth from the plastic cup Steve gave him, free of charge. Meeting Steve’s eye when he lowers his chin to chew, his face caught between shadow and shifting planes of light, hovering on the border of darkness. Self-consciously, Steve raises his hand to his forehead. Billy’s touch glows there, like an ember that refuses to go out.

*

“I’ll tell you what happened to my Midwestern hospitality,” Steve says, switching his dishtowel from one shoulder to the other, “when you tell me why you don’t drink. It’s not because you don’t like the taste.”

The corners of Billy’s mouth quirk up. “It’s not?”

“I don’t think so. ‘Cause, like. I know guys like you. I went to high school with so many guys like you.”

“Wow, okay,” Billy says, laughing now. “High school guys are the worst. You _really_ don’t like me, do you, King?”

Steve tries to keep his expression neutral. “Where did you hear that?”

“Lots of places.” Billy leans forwards on his bar stool, lowering his voice to a secretive, come-hither purr. “Folks in small towns like to talk, amigo. They like to hold grudges, too.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear. People around here will say anything.”

“See, that only makes me _more_ curious,” Billy drawls, with a pink flashing of his tongue. “I heard you used to run this town, Harrington. Then you turned bitch. Is that true?”

“I dunno, man. It was high school. It was years ago.” Steve adjusts the dishtowel, feeling more self-conscious than ever, and paranoid about his posture. “Why did you stop drinking?”

“It wasn’t the taste.” Billy pops an ice cube into his mouth, wincing at the sound it makes when it cracks between his teeth. “Man, don’t even talk to me about the taste of beer. Once upon a time, that was the only thing gettin’ me out of bed in the morning.” He swallows busily, and then says, “What kind of drunk are you, King?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Call you what? King?” Billy’s grinning, shit-eating superiority writ large upon his face. “You’re not wearing a name tag, what else am I supposed to call you?”

“Anything,” Steve says. “Anything you want. But not that.”

It’s now seven o’clock; table service has officially started. Steve’s only two hours into his shift, and already he has dropped glasses, served customers the wrong drinks, and counted out the incorrect change on more than one occasion. Billy becoming a permanent, infuriating sticking point in the margins certainly isn’t helping things; he seems more interested in watching Steve stumble around in a daze and interrogating him about his personal life than he is in actually ordering anything. Steve’s annoyance has more to do with himself than Billy; secretly, he’s having the most fun he’s had on shift in a very long while.

“I’m … a clingy drunk,” he says, when the silence starts to stretch. “I get all … touchy and cuddly.”

Chuckling, Billy pops another ice cube. “I _need_ to see that.”

“I disagree.”

There’s nothing particularly lecherous about the look Billy gives him, his jaw and Adam’s apple working as he empties the last of the ice cubes into his mouth, but Steve feels a flush in his cheeks regardless. “I was the worst kind of drunk, back then,” Billy says, his eyes narrowing. “The angry kind. The kind no one wants to be around.”

“ ‘Back then’?”

“Around two years ago. I had a … well. My Gramma had this saying. Idle hands are the Devil’s work. I had a devil, alright. A drinking devil.”

Billy reaches beneath the collar of his Henley, pulling out a long necklace chain. On the end of the chain is a bronze medallion, which he places on the counter for Steve to inspect. It’s about the size of a poker chip, with the same inscription carved on both sides: UNITY SERVICE RECOVERY—TO THINE OWNSELF BE TRUE.

Steve lowers the medallion, catching Billy’s eye from across the countertop. He has the half-formed suspicion that he’s being tested, his reaction gauged on an invisible meter. “Do you miss it?”

“All the time.”

“What about now?”

Billy stares at him, his eyes alert, foxlike. Wary. Then he nods.

“Should you even be in a place like this?” Steve wonders aloud.

“Probably not. But I have a life to live. Normal people go out with their drinking buddies every now and then. I can’t drink, but I don’t have to be a recluse. I like my friends. They like me. We watch out for each other.” Billy shrugs, then places his palm over the AA medallion and sweeps it into his lap. Hey presto, it’s gone.

“You’re that close,” Steve says. “Like brothers. Comrades.”

“More than you know. My building manager is my sponsor. He held me accountable when I started to go off the rails … and it’s because of him that I’m still here.”

“Well, you did it, man. I mean, he held you accountable, but he didn’t put a gun to your head. You could’ve gone off the rails if you wanted. But you didn’t,” Steve says. Fuck, he sounds dumb. Billy probably thinks he’s dumb. Steve doesn’t even know what he’s trying to say. Worse, he can’t seem to fucking stop. “It was you, too.”

Billy’s head tilts on one side. “Thanks, Harrington.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“No!”

“You know, it’s hard to tell,” teases Steve, “when you spend about ninety-nine per cent of the time being a smartass.”

“What about the other one per cent?”

“He’s … alright. I guess.”

“You _guess_?” Billy shifts impatiently on his bar stool. He reminds Steve of the children he sees in Dr. O’Connell’s waiting room: squirming in their mothers’ laps, unable to sit still. “You know, you and I, we aren’t so different, Harrington. We’ve both got absentee fathers—”

“Excuse me, my father isn’t _absent_. We just don’t live together.”

“Yeah, and that’s because he’s a fucking asshole, right? Am I getting warmer?” When Steve doesn’t answer, Billy licks his lips, perhaps scenting weakness. “Like recognizes like, Harrington—”

“You’re not as slick as you think you are,” Steve says, his voice curt.

“And _you’re_ not as good at deflecting as you think you are,” Billy fires back, equally curt. “Just like any politician. Or is daddy Harrington a banker? I’m thinking somewhere in the city, some swanky high rise. An investment firm that’s _swimming_ in its clients’ swindled money. You’re his golden goose, but something happened—something that made him change his mind and you see the light. It’s hard living up to our fathers’ expectations, no?”

He’s closer to the truth than Steve can possibly admit to himself. Oh, he knows Billy’s baiting him, poking at half-healed stitches to see if they bleed. If Steve were more disciplined, he would walk away, call Billy on his bluff. “Look, are you overcompensating or something? The whole hypermasculine thing. I don’t get it.”

“He finally shows signs of life!” Billy slaps the counter with his hand and several people, including the thirty-somethings from the city, turn around. “Thank _God_ , Harrington. I was starting to think I’d broken you.”

“I am _this_ close,” Steve says, “to having you kicked out, Hargrove. Are you actually going to order something, or was that just a thinly veiled excuse to flaunt the ninety-nine per cent?”

“Very thinly veiled,” Billy says, without a hint of shame. “No, I’m kidding! I just—I just wanted to know if you’ve played poker.”

“You are so full of shit, oh my God—” Steve plants his fists over his eyes, taking a moment to collect himself before dragging them down his face. “Okay, fine. Poker. Yes. I’ve played it.”

“Then you know that the key to winning is not playing by your hand, but by the other person’s hand.” Billy bats his eyelashes with cynical, sticky-sweet innocence. “I’m trying to read you, Harrington.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the most decent-looking guy in this pisspot town, probably the most decent-looking guy in this entire pisspot _state_ , and I’m confused. I don’t like being confused.”

“Right,” Steve says with an angry sneer. “So, it’s a power thing. You’re feeling threatened.”

“I’m not sure if ‘threatened’ is the right word,” Billy says, his smile amplifying. “It’s more like … intellectual _blue balls._ I like to think I’m pretty good at reading people, but you— _you_ don’t give me anything _._ ”

“That’s a first. My ex could read me like a book.”

He glances pointedly over Billy’s shoulder. There, standing just inside the doorway to the bar, is Nancy, her dark hair blown into confused whorls by the wind. Jonathan brings up the rear, holding her coat. Robin walks past Billy and gives Steve an alarmed look: red alert. She disappears into the kitchen— _coward_ , Steve thinks—just as Billy turns his head, frowning, following Steve’s line of sight.

“The guy or the girl?”

Steve scowls at him. “The girl, of course.”

Billy gives Nancy a stony once-over, dismissing her with a curling of his lip. “But you were more attracted to the guy, and that’s why she broke up with you?”

“It had nothing to do with—” Steve says, then realizes, a second too late, what he’s done. He tries to rectify his mistake: “We were just at different places in our lives—”

“Steve?”

Billy leans sideways on his barstool as Nancy shoulders her way through the crowd. Her cheeks are dyed a hot pink from the cold, her eyes furiously bright, nearly blazing in their sockets. She looks more beautiful than ever, but it’s not for him; it won’t ever be for him again.

“Nance,” Steve says, averting his eyes. He doesn’t acknowledge Jonathan.

Nancy takes a deep breath, as if she’s psyching herself up. Then she says, “Steve, if my mother has anything to say about me or Jonathan, she can say it to our faces. She doesn’t need to come to you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Steve says. He lifts the dishtowel from his shoulder, punctuating the end of his sentence with a loud, unsavory _splat_ of beer-sudded water into the sink.

“I’m not an idiot, Steve. I have eyes. So does Mike.” Nancy places a hand on the bar, then withdraws it in dismay; she’d accidentally touched a miscellaneous wet patch. “She doesn’t have to agree with the wedding, okay? But she does need to respect it. _Both_ of you need to respect it.”

Steve’s mouth falls open. “You wanna talk about respect? _Seriously_?”

“I want us to be friends, Steve. Believe it or not, I actually _want_ you and mom at the wedding—”

“Kitten, he just said he doesn’t know,” Billy chimes in, snaking a hand over her shoulder. “Why don’t you and your Lurch-looking boy toy of the month—”

“ _Kitten_?” The color in Nancy’s cheeks deepens to a dangerous stoplight red as she shrinks away from Billy’s touch. “And who the hell are you?”

Billy starts to say something, but Steve cuts across him, blurting out the first word that comes to mind: “Boyfriend. He’s my—he’s my boyfriend.”

He sees Billy’s eyes widen, and Nancy’s shrink to pinheads. Boyfriend. A boy who likes boys. Girls are fine, but boys are quicker. The admission hangs, heavy and stunned, over their heads like an overfilled sail, ready to give way and snuff out the charade for good. Boyfriend, he’d said. Also known as, a boy who likes boys. Boyfriend. _Boyfriend._ Billy’s other hand rests loosely on the countertop, a hair’s breadth from his own. Steve wonders how well they’d fit together, if he were to slot his fingers between the gaps; he’s wondering when he let his guard down, if doing so was really so easy that he never noticed it happened.

“Your—Steve, what—” Nancy murmurs. Jonathan’s at her shoulder, whispering in her ear _let’s go, babe, c’mon_ while throwing guilty smiles at everybody present, but she shrugs him off. “ _Steve_ —”

He stretches one finger out, daring to brush the tip of Billy’s thumb knuckle. Watching Billy’s expression slip back into the shadows, grow heavy-lidded and pale as Steve traces the outline of his nail, then the skin between his thumb and forefinger. Billy swallows with a stiff jerking of throat tendons, running his tongue over his lips before lifting his head. Steve’s never seen anyone look so uncertain.

“I’m really sorry about this,” he says.

Billy shakes his head vehemently. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Steve says. “It should never have happened.”

Billy sucks his lower lip into his mouth. His gaze flits upward, his thumb twitching under Steve’s touch. Stroking Steve’s finger, hooking onto it with his pinkie. The silence has changed flavor, texture; it’s still heavy, but now there’s a racing possibility to it, an inevitability that’s become undeniable. Steve’s heart trips breathlessly against his ribs as he leans in, turning his hand over so that Billy can twine their fingers together properly. The movement brings his lips close. They’re soft, when Steve kisses them; tender. Nothing like the rest of Billy, which is sharp, stitched close to his chest.

Billy smiles against his mouth, then untangles his fingers from Steve’s hand and twists it through Steve’s hair, cupping his cheek to kiss him back. Steve hears him exhale something, a word that sounds like a thrilling cross between _fuck_ and _yeah._ Feeling braver, he presses in, swiping his tongue over Billy’s lip. The hand in his hair tightens its grip. Just as it verges on painful, Billy pulls away; he rounds on Jonathan, who’s staring at them both with his mouth agape and his eyes popping.

“What? It’s 2016, man. You got something against gay people?”

“Me?” Jonathan startles, half-raising his hands. “Uh, no, I—”

“Steve’s not gay,” Nancy declares. Her jaw is set, determined as she stares Steve down, daring him to contradict her. “You’re not.”

Steve begins, “Nance,” but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say to her. If it wasn’t enough for her then, it won’t be enough for her now.

“It was nice seeing you again, Steve,” Jonathan says. He steps forwards, and Steve can’t help the old flare of ownership that lights up his insides, disintegrating into an unpleasant, metallic aftertaste on the back of his tongue; he knows Jonathan can taste it, too. Jonathan’s no longer smiling, his hand resting on Nancy’s arm as if to shield her from outside attack. “Really.”

“Yeah, sure,” Steve says.

He thinks about offering his hand to shake, then changes his mind. Jonathan, in turn, doesn’t hold out his hand, or show him any form of endearment as he herds Nancy away from the bar. Steve takes that to mean that the three of them are finally on the same page. He’s not sure whether he should feel vindicated, or broken hearted all over again.

Billy lets out a high, gleeful whistle. “ _Ouch_. How much trouble did I just get you into?”

Steve stares at Nancy’s retreating figure, his teeth worrying at the inside of his cheek. Some part of him, some childish, sappy, romantic-comedy part of him is hoping for her to turn around—but she doesn’t, of course she doesn’t. In a twisted, backwards sort of way, she was always more committed than him, more grounded in her choices. Maybe that’s why she started looking elsewhere; she didn’t believe he could hold his own without her.

“Listen,” he says, still staring at the door, “I really—I really do need to do some work.”

“Something I said?” Billy’s tone is light, but his eyes are searching, cold, apparently not liking what they’re seeing on Steve’s face.

“No. What? No—shit, I just—”

“You weren’t expecting to see her.”

Steve pushes a restless hand through his hair. His contact lenses are starting to itch, which means he either needs to replace them or buy droppers from the drugstore. The thought of having to do so on top of everything else—getting his car fixed, playing mediator between Karen and Ted and Karen and Nancy, fuck, and the wedding, he can’t forget about the wedding (Do Nancy and Jonathan seriously expect him to attend, after everything that’s happened? Fuck, what the fuck is he supposed to _wear_?)—exhausts him.

“I—look, I’m sorry,” he sighs. “Can we start over?”

“Okay.” Billy’s smile is back, bright and jaunty as it ever was. “You wanna start from when you called me your boyfriend, or when you kissed me?”

“Harrington!” Leon calls from the other end of the bar. “Order up!”

Steve blows air through his teeth. “Bummer, Hargrove. You might have to take a raincheck.”

“What time do you finish?”

“Five, but it varies.” Steve hesitates, looking down at Billy’s hand, wanting the comfort of holding it again. “That might be too long for you to wait.”

Billy flexes the hand resting on the counter. Keeping his eyes trained on Steve’s face, he glances his fingertips off Steve’s knuckles, close but not close enough to actually touch them. Steve thinks: a dare, a tease, a hidden, lucrative promise. “If you fuck anything like you kiss, then I’ll wait forever.”

“ _Harrington!_ ” Leon’s voice is much closer; Steve estimates he has less than thirty seconds before he’s demoted to toilet cleaning duty for the rest of the night.

“You wanna know why they call me King?” he says, leaning in to match Billy’s body language: close, excruciatingly intimate; as if they’re the only two people in the bar, maybe the only two people in the whole world. “Why they _really_ call me King?”

A low, excited spark kindles in Billy’s eyes. He opens his mouth, wide and slack, his tongue wolfish. “Pray tell.”

“Once I convince you to spread those legs for me,” Steve leans in further, holding his mouth so close to Billy’s ear that he can see when his breath disturbs the hairs that have fallen from the scrunchie, “and you won’t need much convincing, by the way, I mean, just look at me—”

Billy’s mouth opens wider. “Speaking of massive egos.”

“—but once I have you open for me, baby, once I have you _begging_ ,” Steve brushes a lock of hair back, feeling Billy shiver at the touch, feeling his own heartrate skyrocket in his chest, “and _only_ when you beg. That’s when I’m gonna wrap your legs around my head, and wear you like a crown.”

He lets go of the lock of hair, watching it fall back into place next to Billy’s ear. Then he steps back, a blank, dazzling smile plastered on his face as he turns to serve the next person in line. He mixes cocktails, pours wine, fields clumsy, drunken attempts at flirtation using all the tools in his repertoire: laughing in all the right places, listening in all the right places, and employing the hunch in all the right places. Switching between these faces is suddenly as easy as changing his shirt; he doesn’t need to look over his shoulder to check that Billy’s still leaning over the bar, nor does he search for his blonde hair in the crowd. Time grows slippery; the crowd starts to thin. Robin comes out of the dining area to harangue him for a cigarette break. Steve throws his dishtowel into the sink, then walks back over to where Billy had been sitting not moments before.

The barstool is empty, but the empty ice cup is still there. It’s turned upside down, dented in the rim where Billy pressed his teeth in, peeled it apart with his idle fingers. Written on the base in ballpoint pen is a cellphone number, and three Xs. _See you soon._

*

“So, what did _Nancy_ want?” Robin says.

Steve ducks his head to light himself a cigarette, watching the smoke evaporate into the night. It’s nine o’clock, which is pretty much the Hawkins equivalent of the Witching Hour; the street outside the Hideaway is deserted, utterly devoid of any signs of life save for a single, shuffling drunk on the sidewalk. Steve might know him. There’s a good chance they went to the same high school, or grew up only a street apart from one another. Thirty-somethings from the city come and go, but for the most part Hawkins is static, same-same, never outgrown. “An RSVP for the wedding.”

Robin makes a face. “Uppity bitch.”

“Hey,” Steve says crossly.

“What? Everyone’s thinking it, Steve, I’m the only one who actually has the balls to say it.” Robin’s knees pop as she hunkers down, squatting on the cobblestones with her apron tucked underneath her backside. “I don’t understand why you keep defending her.”

“It’s not like I can _avoid_ her. Even if I wanted to, Nancy knows where I work. Like, we go to the same doctor, the same grocery store …” He trails off, sucking on the cigarette before realizing that Robin’s staring at him, her expression one of vague disgust.

She says, “By all means, roll over for her, if that’s what you _want_ to happen.”

“That’s not what I—”

“You’re _letting_ it happen,” Robin says. “She asks for a whipping boy and you’re always the first person to volunteer, Steve, I swear to God. It’s actually painful to watch.” She shakes her head, her cheeks lit up by the glow of a notification on her phone. “And to think I used to be in love with you.”

“Fuck off,” Steve says, laughing, coughing through smoke. “Like hell you were.”

“I mean it. I really was in love with you. We all were. Did you know that Barb Holland used to keep your yearbook photos under her pillow?”

He shifts uncomfortably, his neck warming under his collar. “You’re just saying that.”

“Why would I? Steve, you were so _easy_ to love. You were tall, you played basketball, you carried Nancy’s books for her to every class like a proper gentleman. What more could a girl want?”

“I was an asshole,” he says.

“Were you, though?” Robin challenges. “Who cheated, you or the princess?”

“I—” Steve pauses to tap ash from the end of his cigarette, his breath catching in his throat. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because!” he explodes. “Because Will Byers was missing for a whole week and I was in Indianapolis with Dad, alright, I should never have gone, I should’ve been _here_ , and—and Nancy—”

“—Nancy didn’t mean for Jonathan to stick his dick in her? Jesus Christ, Steve, the way you talk about it, it’s like she accidentally slipped and sprained her fucking ankle—cheating’s never an accident, okay? It doesn’t just _happen_.”

Steve’s back pocket vibrates. His hand flies downwards, operating on autopilot; he slides his phone out of his pocket and Robin takes her chance, snatching the device out of his grip.

“Give it back,” he pleads. “C’mon, Robin, it’ll be Nancy, I can’t ignore her, I owe her an explanation—”

“Just hear me out, okay?” Robin flattens herself against the wall of the alleyway, holding his phone behind her back. “I watched this movie with my ex once—”

Steve lowers his hand. “Which ex?”

“ _The_ ex,” she says darkly. “Anyway, we watched this movie, and there was a line from the script that really stood out to me: a relationship is like a shark. It has to keep moving, or else it dies. I feel like that’s the kind of relationship you have with Nancy. You know, you’re stuck in these same circular conversations. Things aren’t getting better, but you don’t know how to end it. Instead of swimming, you sink. This job is dragging you down—this whole _town_ is dragging you down.”

“I like my job,” he says feebly. “I like you.”

“You like getting drunk with me,” Robin points out. “There’s a difference.”

Steve opens his mouth, then closes it. Thinking of Tommy, the explicit trysts they shared in the boys’ locker rooms; the way Tommy would watch him touch himself, the feel of Tommy’s hand on his waist and his breaths in his ear, the smile he’d give Steve after Steve had come in a hot, furious rush across his belly; the same hungry, amused smile that was still on his face when Tommy sat down in the cafeteria later with Carol and Vicki and Carol had asked _what are you so happy about_ and all that would come to mind was _nothing, babe; say, can you pass the Dr. Pepper?_ And Carol would pass the Dr. Pepper with a fleeting glance at the lovebite on Tommy’s neck and she’d looked around at Steve and Steve had looked at her and he’d seen the question there, the truth staring back at him in Carol’s eyes and that’s how she’d known, just by looking at him and seeing the guilt and shame broadcast all over his face. He thinks about telling Robin, spilling the beans completely in a way that he’s never dared to, but she might already know; women always seem to know these things before you do.

“Why are you telling me this?” he says. 

“Because you’re still easy to love.” Robin removes her hand from behind her back, dropping his phone into his waiting palm. “And I’d hate to see you shoot yourself in the foot before you even start the race, King.”

“Thanks, Oprah,” he says, dripping scorn from every syllable. “I thought you didn’t do sentiment?” Grinning, Robin shoves her middle finger in his face. “That’s more like it.”

Robin’s grin fades. She glances back down at her phone, opening another notification with her fingertip. “Steve,” she says, “What did you say his name was?”

He drops the cigarette under his sneaker and leans against the alley wall. “Uh, Hargrove. Why? Do you know him?”

“Maybe. He just has that face, you know? Like he’s an actor or something. Doesn’t he look like an actor? I’m going to Google him,” Robin says, and faster than Steve can blink or move, she starts typing Billy’s name into the text box on her screen.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he hisses.

“Reconnaissance, Steve, relax. This is dating in the 21st century. You need to do your research, like. What if he has a secret wife he only shows online?”

Steve forces out a laugh. “I don’t think Billy has a wife.”

“We’ll see, won’t we? Hargrove. H-A-R-G-R-O …”

Steve watches her like a hawk, his back pressed against the wall so hard he can feel the brick through his uniform. Robin’s French-tipped nails tap and swipe and click across her screen, notification after notification alighting on her face in blueish flashes. Then she cranes her neck, pushing forwards with her heels to come up on her knees. “Holy shit. Holy fucking _shit._ ”

He jolts forwards. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Uh—” Robin blinks down at her screen, then back up at him, her mouth sagging downwards in a hapless O-shape. “Uh, so your boyfriend, Steve? He’s not married, but—”

She’s not on Google anymore, Steve realizes. She’s clicked through to an external website, what looks like a local news article. His unease grows, escalating rapidly into blaring, all-out panic. Something’s not right. He’d known something wasn’t right the instant Billy turned up on his doorstep, entirely too good to be true; he’d let Billy worm his way into his life, he’d let Billy get to him like a stupid jittery crush, but it had never felt right, and Steve should’ve _known._

“Let me see,” he says. His mouth tastes numb. 

Wordlessly, Robin hands the phone to him.

The article is dated February 12, 2012—two days before Valentine’s Day. Steve pushes upwards with his thumb, scrolling until a headline comes into view.

 

 

**INGLEWOOD, CA: SUBURBAN DRUNK DRIVER ALREADY KNOWN TO POLICE, FAMILY**

_The 18-year-old drunk driver who crashed his 1979 Camaro through the front living room of a house in Inglewood is already well-known to law enforcement in the area._

_William ‘Billy’ Hargrove, who is due to appear in court this July, was estranged from his biological father in 2011 after a violent altercation left Hargrove Sr. with three stab wounds to the arms and upper torso. Inglewood’s Chief of Police confirmed this morning that a juvenile restraining order preventing the teenager from entering the family home is still in place._

_“He’s a bright young man, a very bright young man, but he’s also troubled,” a neighbor told_ The Morning Herald _._ _“It’s a miracle no one was hurt.”_

_Hargrove’s step-mother, Susan Hargrove-Mayfield, was asleep upstairs with her daughter at the time of the crash. She said the impact “felt like an earthquake.”_

_“I thought I was dead,” she said. “I thought Billy had actually hit us.”_

 

“Did you—” Robin starts, but Steve shushes her.

_Stab wounds. Restraining order._

He keeps scrolling, but the motion of his thumb has turned erratic, mindless. _Stab wounds. Restraining order._ The words cascade over him like falling bricks, knocking the air out of him, leaving him reeling on wounded, sprung legs. Steve scrolls faster, his vision growing muddy and confused, his breath hissing through his teeth like steam; faster and faster, _stab wounds_ and _restraining order_ screaming in his ears, following him down the page, leaping out from every sentence as if intending to lash themselves around his neck and throttle him.

 _Stab wounds. Restraining order. I thought I was dead, I thought Billy had actually hit us. Funny how life is sometimes,_ mi amigo. _Funny how these circular conversations—_

When Steve reaches the end of the last paragraph, he comes face to face with a changeling.

The mugshot is grainy and bad quality; if it weren’t for the dark blonde of Billy’s hair, Steve might not have recognized him. He’s posed against a nondescript backdrop, and his face—there’s something wrong with his face. It’s not the Billy who turned up on his doorstep, smiling and golden and warm to the touch; this version of Billy is crouched over, angry, defiant. There’s a stooping darkness in the eyes, a callousness that has Steve’s lower extremities flooding with icy, Arctic dread. A network of broken blood vessels crisscrosses Billy’s nose and cheeks, and Steve understands implicitly that this is because Billy was drinking almost every day, that he was a steady alcoholic despite the fact he was barely old enough to drink legally, let alone get behind the wheel of a car.

_Stab wounds. Restraining order. Drunk driver, do you know what that means, Steve? Do you think you have a problem, do you ever feel like_

(blacking out)

_How often do you_

(black out)

He stares at Billy’s mugshot, at _stab wound_ and _restraining order_ and _drunk driver_ like they’re written in the hieroglyphs of an improbable language; at the snarl tangling Billy’s eyebrows, twisting the boy’s face into a hateful inverse of itself. He doesn’t understand. He hadn’t understood when he’d come home from Indianapolis to find Nancy in bed with someone else; his brain had tried to flip the scene like the sides of a Rubik’s cube, rearranging the jumbled sheets and Jonathan’s discarded book bag and Nancy’s white, stricken face into something that wasn’t so fucked up and wrongwrong _wrong._ In the end, Steve hadn’t been able to reconcile the two, and slowly but surely, his life had fallen apart.

*

The sky is pink and gray, the air still. Steve steps outside into the alleyway, dragging a trash bag in each hand. Across the Hideaway’s faded brick wall, the shadows of rats move back and forth like dancers, breaking formation and scattering when Steve hauls the trash bags up over the side of the dumpster. The smell of moldering food is gaudy and sweet, almost summery; parallel to the alley, a streetlamp flickers on and off, its broken fluorescents humming. Billy stands under the fractured, sputtering light, waiting for him.

“Have you been drinking?” he asks Steve.

The streetlamp hums back to life, dying Billy’s hair a starry white, reducing his face to a single dimension, translucent and washed out, like a face drawn on paper. When the light disappears, Billy’s face moves in reverse: liquefying and blackening his eyes to the color of bruises, hollowing out his cheekbones in strange, stop-start blips. He is harder now; skeletal, gaunt. In the dark, Billy could almost be the humpbacked, flinty-eyed stranger from the mugshot. Steve doesn’t know, yet, if this Billy is dangerous. He doesn’t know if he should be afraid of him.

“Is that a dealbreaker for you?” he replies.

Billy takes a step closer just as the streetlamp flickers back to full strength, illuminating the alleyway in bright, garish detail. “No,” he says. “I’m just making sure you want this.”

He takes another step forward, reaching out as if to slip his hand into the back pocket of Steve’s trousers. The assumed familiarity of the movement startles Steve into action; he backs away, stopping Billy’s hand in mid-air.

“Don’t touch me.”

“What?” Billy says. Steve sees him hesitate, the tremor in his voice reflected back in his hand when it falls.

“I found your mugshot.” Steve spits the word out like poison, like they’re something rotten he’s swallowed, blighted and riddled with worms. “Is that why you don’t see your sister anymore? Because there’s a restraining order? Because you fucking stabbed your dad, you lying, two-faced—”

Billy gives a small, twitching shake of his head. “I never lied to you.”

Another step, and Billy’s getting closer; he’s close enough to touch him. Steve stands with his hands balled into tight fists at his sides, his spine as straight as a cattle prod. His teeth chatter, but not from the cold; even though the early morning temperature is brisk enough to raise goosebumps on his arms and chest, Steve is running hot, feverish, on edge.

“Steve,” Billy says, and he sounds so soft, so inexplicably gentle, it’s as if he knows how frail Steve is, how prone to breakage. “Look at me.”

He can’t, his eyes won’t focus; it’s too bright, why is it so bright? Hot, too, like standing on a stage; Steve’s perspiring under his work shirt, his back and stomach and armpits dripping with sweat, his skin a tight and brittle chokehold. If he looks at Billy, Steve doesn’t know what he’ll do. He might cry, he might fly at Billy in a biblical rage. He might even kiss him.

He hears Billy’s boots crunch on gravel; another step, then two. Billy’s face is inches away, but his features are blurry, rushing downward like the waters of a river—or maybe that’s because Steve still can’t look at him fully. He can smell him, though: he can smell Billy’s cologne. It’s a new scent, a new detail Steve wasn’t expecting; the nose ring is new, too. Did Billy go home and add these details, just for him? What does ‘home’ look like for Billy these days, if it’s not in California?

“Never,” Billy repeats firmly. Out of the corner of Steve’s eye, he does that twitchy shake of the head again. “Never, ever.”

“It’s still lying if it’s by omission, asshole!”

His voice multiplies between the alleyway’s narrow walls, bouncing from brick to brick until it sounds as though ten other Steves are standing behind him, muttering in sullen, musty echoes: _asshole, asshole, asshole._ He hates how petulant they all sound.

“Do you think I owed that to you?” Billy asks. He doesn’t seem angry, like Steve thought he would; he doesn’t even seem defensive. Instead, he sounds curious, as if the question is one of real philosophical interest. “Do you think I owed you a thesis on my life when we met, Steve?”

Steve digs his nails stubbornly into his palms. “No, but—”

“Why are you so upset about this?” Billy presses, in a voice so rough it takes Steve’s breath away. “What do you want from me?”

 _You know,_ Steve wants to say. _Looking like that, how could you not know?_ God, he wants to kiss Billy so _badly_. He’s not sure if he can, though, and he needs Billy to understand that. He needs Billy to see it in his eyes, and respond by taking him in his arms to kiss him first. He needs Billy to kiss him and hold him and fuck him, otherwise it’ll never happen; otherwise Steve Harrington will go on like this, moving through life in the same cookie-cutter town he was born in and the same town he will most likely grow old and die in, like a gramophone needle stuck in the wrong groove, scratching over and over in an endless, whining circle.

“I liked you,” he says, staring down at his feet. “I—I really fucking liked you, man.”

His nails are cutting into his palms, pressing deeply enough to leave marks; he can smell cologne and sawdust and the sour, sickly odor of rotting vegetables, and lemons and chlorine and boysweat. The memories settle in his pores like falling ashes, dirtying him, making him want to itch and pick at his skin. There’s regret there, clinging to him with the greediness of a lost lover, and longing, and loneliness. It was the loneliness that Steve latched onto the hardest, like a dog with a bone; loneliness that drew him into Tommy’s orbit, and kept him in Nancy’s. He would’ve settled for anything just to make the loneliness go away, and maybe that’s the secret and terrible truth of all life on Earth, every single person who is afraid of ending up alone.

“I don’t date, Harrington,” Billy says at last. “I don’t know how. All of this is new to me. They sentenced me to sixteen months,” he adds in a smaller voice. Steve waits for him to keep talking, but for once, Billy seems undone, at a total loss for words.

A palm, its surface warm and gravelly as sand, touches his face. Billy cups his jaw with deliberate care, his thumb brushing at the jut of Steve’s cheekbone.

“I didn’t know.” Billy’s voice has dropped to a whisper, to the soft sigh of a breeze. His palm moves from Steve’s cheek, hovering, trembling as if terrified of touching him too much, and what the consequences might be. “I didn’t know if—if you felt the same way. That’s why I couldn’t say anything. But I wanted to.” He nods slowly, more to himself than to Steve. “You deserved to hear it from me.”

His hand drops away, knocking against Steve’s hip. Steve touches their fingertips together, then leans in to kiss Billy’s cheek.

“You smell good,” he murmurs, breathing over Billy’s jaw. “Was that for me?”

Billy turns his head. Steve can feel him smiling as his nose brushes the crook of his neck. “I’m not a complete animal.”

They stand there for a moment, all but entwined under the broken streetlamp, Billy pressing light, dry kisses to the column of Steve’s neck, Steve breathing in the smell of Billy’s cologne. Billy’s hands find his hips, then his ass; he sighs against Steve’s thudding pulse, his breath coming in husky gasps as their groins push together, sharp and needy.

“Let me walk you to your car,” Billy hums in his ear.

There’s an upwards lilt to his sentence, and Steve understands that it’s as much of a question as it is an offer. Billy is asking him permission. The realization seems impossible at first, ludicrous; then it makes perfect sense. Billy is more afraid of Steve than Steve is of him.

“Okay,” he says.

Taking Billy’s hand.


	4. Day 41 (Boy next door)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating has changed! Do with that information what you will.
> 
> Content warnings: implied/referenced child abuse, implied/referenced suicide/parent death, undernegotiated kink, and implied/referenced self harm.
> 
> Last but not least: a very special thank you and internet hug to Tracy, for talking about her headcanons with me and very kindly overseeing this chapter as it entered its final stages. Please check out her [account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tracy7307/pseuds/tracy7307/works?fandom_id=10778845) if you have the time, she has some wonderful Harringrove content <3

“Look,” Billy says. He holds out his hand, palm down, fingers flat. “You see that?”

“Yeah,” says Steve.

“That’s how you spot a junkie. They shake, rattle, and roll, baby. All the way to the liquor store. That’s what I was doing for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Drinkin’ all night, asleep when the sun comes up, and then awake at noon with the shakes and a hangover that felt like Thor’s hammer cleaving its way through my skull. Rinse and repeat.”

Billy flexes his fingers, and the minute tremor in his hand stills.

“It’s not a devil,” he says. “It’s a sickness. It’s inherited, like diabetes, or schizophrenia.”

His other hand is bunched at the base of his throat, closed over the bronze of his AA medallion. Billy holds the necklace chain like a priest’s rosary, wrapped tight around his knuckles. He’s been talking for a while, his voice low and remarkably even, almost bored-sounding. The hood of Steve’s car has gone cold underneath them, the dawn sun nothing more than a peachy smudge between the matchstick figures of the trees, the faintest suggestion of light.

“My grandfather was a drunk, and a con artist,” Billy says. “He beat my Gramma on the regular. Six times she tried to leave him, but he kept luring her back with promises. He told her that he would be better, that she was the love of his life, that he’d give up drinkin’ for the sake of their marriage. It’s funny,” here he sighs, tucking a loose strand of hair behind his ear, “I remember hearing Dad tell Mom the same thing, every time he got angry. I never connected the dots, because he only had a temper. He could hold his alcohol well enough, so it wasn’t that bad. That’s what he told us. That’s what I grew up believin’.”

Billy starts rubbing his knee with his hand, as if he’s in pain. His boots slide through the dirt, restless; one bumps against the toe of Steve’s sneaker, a press of warmth that’s all too fleeting, gone when Billy moves his leg away.

“I don’t like makin’ excuses,” he goes on. “I can’t afford to make too many, because I need to stay accountable for the sake of sobriety. But I’m human, which means I try to see patterns in things like everybody else. You know, we—we like it when the random events in our lives make sense, because it gives us closure. I was born with a genetic predisposition towards being a fuck-up, but I still wonder what I … what I’d be like if I hadn’t had that push. How many years I might’ve …”

Very suddenly, he looks up; his shoulders tense and his ears prick forwards, like a dog that’s been startled by a strange noise. His eyes widen, becoming glazed, fixed, as they stare into the gloom, at the mist unfurling from the forest floor like cigarette smoke, or breath; and Steve understands that he’s not here anymore. Billy has faded elsewhere, slipped into another body, another point in time. He is soft and faraway, like the unreal haze of a dream, or a nightmare. The kind of nightmare that you can only wake up screaming from.

“I can’t remember what I was doin’ home that day.” Still in that voice of eerie composure. Billy’s hand is the only part of him that’s moving, dragging across his knee in slow circles; the rest is frozen in place, rigid as a statue on the hood of Steve’s car. “Maybe I just had a premonition that something bad was gonna happen, I dunno. All I know is, I came home and mom, she was … well, she was lyin’ in the bathtub and there was red all around her. The first thought I had was that it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Blood doesn’t look like that, at least not in the movies. You know, in the movies, you can tell the blood’s fake, just chocolate syrup and red food dye. But some of it had dried on the sides of the tub and so it’d gone brown, scabby, and she was … I don’t know how long she’d been there for, so I did what my dad always told me to do in an emergency. I called 911. But she was already dead, I knew she was.”

“How old were you?” Steve asks.

Billy shrugs vaguely, his eyes flicking down to his knee where his hand continues to circle. “Twelve. Thirteen, maybe.”

“Christ.”

Steve doesn’t understand how Billy can be so calm. He suspects he might not be, truly; between the coiled loops of the necklace chain, Billy’s knuckles have turned white and strained, his skin nearly purple from where the chain has cut off his circulation.

“In that house, things were only ever sometimes bad,” Billy continues dutifully. “Usually, they were pretty good. Then she passed, and everything was bad again, and it didn’t stop being bad for a long time. Dad and I, we were like two rats trapped under a bucket; we couldn’t stop taking bites out of each other. Mostly he took the bigger chunk, but I made sure I got some swings in every now and then. I can be a real mean son of a bitch when I wanna be, and when I wasn’t losin’ half my mind to the bottle, I was out on the streets. So.” His mouth tightens into a hollow, thin-lipped smile. “You saw what it came to.”

 _Stab wound. Restraining order. Oh, and she thought she was dead, you can’t forget that._ “I don’t know what to say,” Steve murmurs.

(What do you say? he thinks. Is there anything you _can_ say in response to something like that? Somehow, _my condolences_ doesn’t seem to cut it; nor does _I’m sorry_ _for your loss_. He tells himself that he doesn’t want to hear what comes next, that he’s already heard enough, but it’s like passing a four-car pileup on the highway, or witnessing a brutal mugging; horrified as Steve is by the scenes of violence, he can’t possibly look away, can only hang onto every word with sick, voyeuristic fascination.)

“You don’t need to say nothin’,” Billy says. “I’m the one who—you know, I’m the one who owes you an apology. I should’ve been more honest with you from the beginning.”

Steve feels something hot and tight and painful clench in his chest. “I can see why you weren’t.”

“I have a strong fight or flight response. I guess it comes from a lifetime of bein’ on edge. I say to myself, oh, he doesn’t like you, he just wants something from you. So I test people, I push their boundaries. When they leave, when they’ve had enough, that’s when I can say to myself, well, Billy-boy, you never wanted them around anyway. You never needed them.”

“Sounds like a lonely way to live,” Steve says.

“It’s easier, now. I’m still unlearning the person I was, but I don’t feel like runnin’ so much, if that makes sense. Everyone in AA is runnin’ from something, you know. Everyone who’s angry is scared, deep down. I don’t drink, I don’t even smoke, I say my prayers every night before bed like a good Catholic boy,” Billy says, with an odd, rasping laugh, “and if I start thinking about runnin’—to the liquor store, that is—I call my sponsor.”

“Do you need to call your sponsor now?”

Billy stares down at his circling hand, his pupils huge and tremulous. Steve has a sudden, nonsensical reminder of _Macbeth_ , the play they studied in English during his freshman year. Of Lady Macbeth, driven mad by the thought of blood on her hands. _Out, damn spot._

“Billy?” Carefully, Steve reaches across and stops Billy’s wrist, holding it in place. There’s a second of silence, then several seconds more. Billy’s hand rises, slipping out of his grip. It runs up his opposite arm, as if to rid it of invisible cobwebs, or a skein of netting.  _Out, get out._

“Maybe I do.” Billy tucks the AA medallion back under his shirt, close to his heart. “That depends on you, Steve. On whether or not you’re afraid of me.”

“I—”

“It’s okay if you are,” Billy says, using that dead, colorless voice from before, as if he’s talking about someone else and not himself. “I understand. You can’t exactly bring a convicted felon and ex-alcoholic home to the parents, now can you?”

 _He’s so young_ , Steve thinks. _1994 … one year apart, but …_ Somehow, Billy seems younger than his twenty-two years, diminished, vulnerable. When they’d first met, Steve had thought Billy was older. The distance between that Billy and the one sitting on the hood of his car seems light years away, like the distance between two planets; he wonders if Billy was one of those weirdly young-old children whose early maturity was forced upon him out of circumstance. Survival of the fittest, in the most awful sense imaginable.

“You never gave me any reason to be afraid,” he says. “And I don’t live with my parents, Billy.”

He waits for Billy to sneer at him, to call him stupid, naïve. Steve’s always been a little bit naïve, flighty and prone to daydreams. He thinks Billy’s probably the opposite—the type of guy to view naivety as a sign of cowardice or weakness or whatever. Steve waits for it like a child anticipating a slap, cringing, fearful of the impact, the blossoming sting.

“Give me five minutes,” Billy mutters.

He slides off the BMW’s hood, pulling his phone from his pocket. Steve tucks his hands into the sleeves of his sweater and watches Billy walk off into the trees. He feels it almost immediately, the absence of Billy’s warmth, void his voice leaves behind; that’s the thing about him, Steve reflects, shivering. That’s the thing about Billy: you tend to notice when he’s gone.

It’s just past six o’clock in the morning, but out here, at the edge of Hawkins woods, it may as well be the dead of night. There’s a furtive, brooding cast to the trees, growing too closely together to allow any light to penetrate their roots. If Steve were to follow Billy into the darkness, he would find the dead remnants of old bonfires, beer bottles buried underneath the fallen pine needles like dusty, forgotten time capsules, signposting the years—he is twelve, weaving along the designated path on his bike with Tommy hot on his heels, he is sixteen, Stacey Cunningham’s panties stuffed into his back pocket like a lace trophy and his hand travelling up the inside of her thigh; he is eighteen and then he is twenty-three, coming full circle, watching the mist part before him and wondering what awaits him, wondering if he’s brave enough to meet it eye-to-eye.

“He told me to stay,” Billy says. “See what happens.”

“What do you want to happen?”

Billy’s face breaks into a smile. Striding forwards, he takes Steve’s face in his hands, pushing him further up the hood of the car to fit between his legs. The kiss is open-mouthed and clumsy, little more than a sweaty pressing of their bodies, a closeness in breath. Steve opens his eyes and sees that the mist is gone, dispersed by the lengthening rays of the sun; there’s a breeze now, stirring the tops of the trees, carrying a promise of warmth, a long spring and an even longer summer. He tightens his legs around Billy’s waist, and kisses him back.

*

Steve steps out of the shower, dripping. His bathroom is small, almost an afterthought compared to the rest of his apartment; it didn’t have a mirror when he moved in, so he was forced to compensate by hanging one above the sink. He examines his reflection as he holds his towel anxiously around his hips. His shoulders are broad, tapering into a narrow, freckled waist and flat, unremarkable buttocks. He supposes he should be most proud of his legs; they’re longer than the legs of any girl he knows, and finely muscled from years of pounding up and down a waxed basketball court. Through the wall, he can hear music playing. Billy.

Quickly, while his skin is still wet from the shower, he shaves his nipples and belly button with a blunt razor. He thinks about shaving his balls, something he hasn’t done since he was with Nancy; he has no idea if Billy expects that sort of thing from his prospective partners. Billy said he doesn’t date, but that could mean _anything_ ; Steve shouldn’t assume that Billy’s refrained from sex entirely. Is he overthinking things? What if Billy’s not here for … _that_? ‘That’ as in fucking, being fucked. Like Steve doesn’t even know what the implications of ‘that’ are, like he’s _timid_ all of a sudden. What if Billy decides he’s been waiting for too long, and leaves before Steve can even get dressed?

Nick Cave is playing from his speakers when Steve finally exits the bathroom, questioning the existence of angels and an interventionist God. He finds Billy standing next to the bookshelf, rummaging through the box of cassette tapes Steve brought with him from his dad’s house. There are more boxes on the higher shelves, taking up the spaces intended for books and homely knickknacks; Steve had left them there when he moved in, telling himself he would eventually unpack them, but he never did. He knows what it looks like from an outsider’s perspective: that he’s merely squatting, in transition.

“Hey,” he says stiffly.

Billy jumps a little, dropping whatever he’s holding back into the box. “Hey. I was just, uh—”

“Going through my stuff?”

Billy inclines his head, looking curiously abashed. He’s been here before, in Steve’s kitchen. But that was then, and this is now. Now Billy seems awkward and out of place in his surroundings, like a giant in a doll’s house: overly large, careful where he steps. Duck-footed and shy. “Somethin’ like that.”

“Let me see.” Steve steps closer to the bookshelf, brushing against Billy’s shoulder as he peers into the cardboard box. He’d been expecting to see cassette tapes, old records he’d borrowed from Jonathan and neglected to return, mainly out of spite. What he doesn’t expect to see is his boyhood baseball glove, so worn and well-loved the stitches are falling out—and, tucked just underneath, an old Christmas card he received in the mail the year before last.

“You played baseball?” Billy asks him.

“Uh-huh. I was pretty good at it, too,” Steve says, but he doesn’t elaborate further. A lump forms in his throat as he reaches for the Christmas card, sliding it carefully out of the box so as not to damage the photographer’s paper. Professionally done, the card shows a sleeping infant wearing an oversized Santa’s hat.

Billy sounds a little breathless when he says, “Is she …?”

Steve shakes his head. “No. She’s my friend’s. My best friend’s, actually.”

He flattens the card out, showing Billy the embossed script inside:

 

_Sending Christmas joy!_

_—Tommy, Carol, and baby Ava_

 

“You must be close,” Billy says.

Steve lifts his gaze. Billy’s watching him intently, his eyebrows pulled into an expression he doesn’t recognize. Not anger. A sacred understanding, perhaps.

“We were,” he says shortly. “It was a long time ago, you know?”

“Yeah.” Billy’s voice is hushed, grave. “What happened to him?”

“Someone poisoned his dog. She weighed about fifty pounds, and I don’t even like dogs that much, but she was one of the gentlest animals I’d ever met. She never barked at people, not even if they were strangers. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world for someone to, you know…”

He mimes pressing a gun to his head, making Billy curse under his breath. “Did you ever find out who did it?”

“No. It could’ve been an accident, I mean … fox bait that she somehow got a hold of and swallowed. We never found out. He skipped town with his high school girlfriend, like, a week later. I didn’t hear from him again after that. Didn’t expect to. Then I got a surprise in the mail.” He lets the  Christmas card fall into the box, then covers it with the baseball glove, the same way they found it. “That was years ago. I still dunno what to think of it. Maybe it’s his way of saying it wasn’t my fault. That it had nothing to do with me, that it was just this … _town._ I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever find out.”

“It’s not your fault,” Billy says sharply. “How could you know? Don’t go down that path, Steve. Closure is a myth. You won’t get it from him.”

Steve tries to swallow around the lump that’s formed in his throat. It’s like trying to swallow sandpaper, scratchy and painful. “What am I supposed to do, then?”

“Forgive yourself. Life’s too short. You can trust me on that.” Billy’s hands circle his waist, so weighty and warm Steve can feel their heat through his sweats. “You’re only, what, twenty-three? Off the top of my head, I can think of two things you’re better off doing.”

He tucks his chin snugly into the crook of Steve’s neck, the outline of his cock nudging suggestively at the back of his thigh. It’s not like Steve hasn’t thought about this: Billy’s hands on his hips, holding him down. Lying awake at night, he’s even touched himself to it, come hard to the fantasy of hands that could take what they wanted with ease.

“Can—can I get you a drink?” he hears himself stammer. “Non-alcoholic, obviously.”

Billy’s chin jerks from his neck. “Ice is fine. Steve—”

He sounds like he might be asking Steve a question, or waiting for him to say something. His hands drop away as Steve retreats to the fridge, fishing a glass from the sink. He badly wants a cigarette. A glass of wine to wash it down. Steve thinks that if he ever has to look at the color of wine again—red, like in the movies, a dark, purplish red that you can’t wash out, _out damn spot_ —he might actually hyperventilate.

“Steve,” Billy says again. When Steve turns back around, he discovers that the sunlight has reached almost all the way through his blinds, turning Billy’s hair into a pretty circlet of gold. His eyes are hooded, intent, and not so blue as Steve once thought; there’s also, tantalizingly, flecks of green in them.

“I guess we’re both pretty bad at this,” he says softly, apologetically.

Billy laughs, drifting forward to relieve the glass from his hand. His breath gusts over Steve’s face, warm and comfortable. “I don’t believe it, pretty boy. What exactly did you tell me last night? That you were, uh, gonna wear me _like a crown_?”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Excuse me? _Pretty boy_?”

“You’re goddamn right you are.” Resting the glass of ice on the counter, Billy’s hands recircle his hips, squeezing hard. “You’ve got the prettiest lips I’ve ever kissed. Pretty lips for a pretty boy. You wanna kiss me with those lips again, Harrington, I won’t complain.” He licks an unexpected stripe up Steve’s neck, grinning like a loon; he’s generous with his smiles, Steve’s noticed. He’s infectious. “You wanna keep it PG, fully clothed, I’m fine with that, too. So long as you stop worryin’ about what other people are gonna think of you.”

Steve stares at him, feeling idiotic. _Fucking_ , he mentally recites to himself. _Getting fucked. Billy wants to fuck you, dipshit. He’s hard for you, he wants you._ “Sorry,” he says, deliberately slow. “I didn’t hear that. Do you mind repeating it?”

His grin darkening, Billy leans forward to trap his chin with his hand. “ _You_ ,” he growls, “have the prettiest—”

He kisses Steve full on the mouth, hard as a punch, making him lurch backwards with the surprise and force of it.

“—fullest—”

Billy kisses him again, nipping at his lip with his teeth, slipping his tongue inside when Steve starts to gasp for air, the hardness in his sweats sudden and earnest and _very_ present.

“—most luscious angel’s lips—”

When Billy kisses him a third time, Steve’s ready; he fists his hands in Billy’s shirt and flattens his palms against his chest. There’s second of give, Billy yielding into the kiss with a wet, almost _girlish_ sigh—then, without warning, he shoves back. Steve’s head cracks against the fridge, knocking magnets and doctor’s appointments from their assigned perches; his hands are wrestled away from him and back down to his sides. Billy’s laughing, his eyes bright and boyishly wicked as he holds Steve’s hands captive and Steve can’t help it—he starts laughing, too, neither of them can stop laughing.

“—I have _ever_ kissed,” Billy finishes. When he kisses Steve again, it’s softer, softest; and when Steve rocks his hips, the kiss turns into an echoing moan. “Wanna fuck you, pretty boy,” Billy adds, his breath hot on Steve’s neck, “if you’ll let me.”

“Not—not yet,” Steve whispers back. “I wanna try something.”

He pushes with his hands and Billy relents, loosening his grip on his wrists. Steve touches the thin material of his Henley, seeking out the soft swells of Billy’s nipples. He pinches one, watching with satisfaction as Billy arches onto his toes, his eyes fluttering shut in sleepy pleasure. While his eyes are still closed, Steve reaches for the glass of ice. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, exactly, only that it feels right. Feels needed.

“Don’t move,” he says.

Billy only hums, his hips rolling as Steve tweaks his nipple. Almost all of his hair has come loose from the scrunchie, softening his jawline; his neck is flushed a glowing red. Steve lifts the Henley up, all the way up, baring Billy’s chest to the air. Nipples plump, pink, and perfect.

“You’re so gorgeous,” Steve tells him. He ducks his head, pushing Billy’s hair behind his ear, nipping at the lobe. “You _know_ you’re gorgeous. I think that’s what I like the most …”

“Steve.” Billy’s eyes are open, wide and awed as they drink him in. He’s breathing hard and fast through his mouth, his stomach muscles thrumming under Steve’s hand. Struggling to stay in control.

Steve plants two fingers in the center of his chest. “Didn’t I tell you not to move?”

He plucks an ice cube from the glass, wincing a little at the cold. Billy’s breath whoops in his chest; he rests a shaky hand on the back of Steve’s neck for support, playing with stray tufts of hair. Pulling and stroking in turns.

Steve starts slow, with Billy’s nipples.

The ice, trapped between the heat of his fingers and the heat emanating from Billy’s chest, melts almost on contact. Like frigid tears, it drips in long, thin tendrils over Billy’s areola, past his sternum, below the ridges of his ribs. It raises goosebumps on his arms, goosebumps that Steve can feel when he wraps a hand around Billy’s waist, pulling him close; both of them watch, transfixed, as the ice collects in Billy’s bellybutton, crystalline and glistening. When the tendrils start running towards his waistband, Steve sinks to his knees and laps it up with his tongue—all of it, from his breastbone to his pelvis, worshipful.

“Should make you lie down,” he says. Panting shallowly against Billy’s waistband, his chin wet with spit and cold. “Make you touch yourself with an ice cube while I suck you off.”

Billy’s answer is a faint, hurt moan. The muscles in his stomach jump, rippling like the surface of a pond that’s been disturbed by the falling stone. Steve tries to imagine what they’ll look like when Billy comes, and has to readjust himself in his sweats before plunging onwards:

“I should torture you with it. Try and make you come before the ice melts.”

When he looks up, he sees that Billy’s eyes have taken on a heavy, glassy cast. Steve’s fingers are numb and uncomfortable, his knees already sore from kneeling on the linoleum, but he wouldn’t have traded this for anything. Encouraged by the hands in his hair, he tugs on the zipper of Billy’s jeans, resting his cheek against the bulge there.

“Or I could just have you naked,” he says, licking sweetly at the shape of Billy’s cock through the denim. “Laid out on my bed. You wouldn’t be wearing anything, except for your toolbelt.”

Billy’s cock is wet when Steve pulls it out of his underwear, so thick and swollen at the tip that it almost looks bruised. He’s shaved smooth, but that’s no surprise. Steve runs his hand over the satiny texture of Billy’s balls, weirdly appealing to the touch; there’s something unspeakably exotic about a man with no body hair, he thinks. Like some kind of hairless cat.

“God, your fucking _mouth_.” Billy sounds like he’s hanging on by a thread, desperate, his nails raking burning paths across Steve’s scalp. He holds on for a little longer, his hips kicking as Steve kisses his weeping cock; then, with a snarling whine, he drags Steve brutally to his feet. Before Steve can ask him how it was, he’s turned around, driven bodily down the hallway in a mad scramble. Steve can’t see, he can’t speak; all ability to form coherent speech is shattered as Billy kisses him, _tears_ at him. Steve’s sweats are yanked down to his knees, his bare skin prickling as his underwear is pushed to one side; dizzy with adrenaline, he lets himself be swept up by the tide of lust, lost in the press of Billy’s mouth, the _sounds_ he keeps making as he kisses and bites at every part of him he can reach … Steve’s hip crashes into the stereo, causing the song to skip and stutter: _wake up m-m-my-my love … wake up m-m-my love_ _…_

“Fuck, Steve,” Billy moans. They’ve made it to the bedroom, Billy cornering him between the mattress and the headboard with his legs hoisted over his elbows. The blinds are drawn, the air stuffy and stale, but Billy’s eyes blaze like a tiger’s in the dark as he presses a kiss to Steve’s kneecap. “You really get me goin’, you know that?”

“ _You_ get me going,” Steve tells him. “Ever since I met you, I … couldn’t stop thinkin’ about you. You got right under my fucking skin, I never … no one’s ever …”

He’s wet, embarrassingly so, his cock jumping as Billy parts his thighs; he resists the urge to cover his crotch. Instead, he grips himself around the base, taking Billy’s hand and guiding it to where he wants him the most. Billy takes over from his fingers, rubbing the heel of his palm over his cockhead.

“I want you to show me,” he says quietly. “Want to see what you look like when you make yourself come. Can you do that for me, pretty boy?”

He wraps his hands around Steve’s ankles, maneuvering his legs into a wide, indecent arc atop the mattress. Steve can’t quite see his face, but he can still feel the force of his eyes: hard and uncompromising as they sweep over his chest, his face, leaving no part of him unturned.

“S-shit,” he mutters. “Okay. Just—just give me a second.”

With some difficulty, Steve pushes himself up on his elbows and feels under his pillow for the lube. Billy snatches the bottle from him and holds it up to the light, reading the label aloud: “ ‘Strawberry Kisses’?”

“It actually tastes alright,” Steve says, a little defensively. “Like cough syrup.”

He takes the bottle back, shaking open the cap and warming the lube in his palms. He feels very much like the first time he had sex with a girl: giddy and awkward and horny enough— _fuck_ —horny enough to fucking burst from his skin the instant someone lays a hand on him. It’s something about the way Billy looks at him, about the way he touches him. Like being tipsy, all fuzzy excitable warmth and dulled inhibitions, but without the loss of control that accompanies total intoxication. Steve can’t get enough of it.

He strokes eagerly and without grace, his fingers trailing lube as they move from his tip to his balls, blurry and rough and so very good. Someone moans and Steve realizes it’s Billy, moving stealthily between his legs. His hand cages Steve’s cock, touching and tugging and pulling, then creeps down to his hole. Steve’s spine arches high, his body pushing back against Billy’s finger greedily; he curls his ankles around Billy’s waist and digs in, every nerve buzzing when Billy inches forwards, shoving him against the headboard to whisper praises and obscene come-ons into the curve of his neck.

“What was that?” Billy, sounding vengeful, knowing, his teeth sharp as sin against Steve’s pulse. “You want something, Steve?”

His finger caresses Steve’s hole, simultaneously infuriating and overwhelming; no matter how much Steve whines and lifts his hips, Billy doesn’t push inside. Steve’s cock claps helplessly against his belly on the upstroke; he could almost count the beats, like a child skipping rope. “I—” What was that chant the girls taught him in middle school? _Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man._ “I want—”

Billy crowds him closer to the headboard, his smile hovering mockingly in mid-air. “What do you want?” he demands. “My finger, or my dick?”

“ _Both_ ,” Steve blurts out. “Your dick. I don’t care. I want—I want _all_ of you, fuck—”

Billy makes a low sound, thin and shivery. “You’re killing me,” he says. Deliriously, Steve thinks: _patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man._ His hand grapples for the sheets, his cock, his fucking sanity, pleasure wound tight as a clockspring in his chest. The tips of Billy’s long hair tickle his face as he pushes his cock between his cheeks. _Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man. Bake me a cake as fast as you can_ —

“I’m coming,” he chokes out, half in surprise. It’s too much, Billy’s too fucking much, Billy’s barely breached him and already Steve’s cock is _molten_ in his hand, “Billy, I-I can’t—”

“Yeah,” Billy’s slurring. His mouth is a brand, searing kisses onto Steve’s skin. “Fuck yeah, Steve—”

Premature, Steve’s body folds at both ends. There’s a moment of freefall, a weightlessness, as if he’s been jettisoned from his body and into a purely atomic state; when he comes down it’s with a strange emptiness in his chest, a floating, carved out feeling. From somewhere above him, he can hear the frantic tread of Billy’s breath. Speeding up, then cutting short. It’s then that Steve comprehends the wetness at his entrance, Billy’s come dripping from where his cock is buried, halfway to the hilt, inside him.

“Fuck.” Billy’s lost his voice; what’s left of it is a dry husk. Swaying, he eases himself free, sitting up on his knees. “Fuck, _fuck_. I’m sorry.”

There’s quite a bit of come. Some of it is drying on Billy’s belly in a pearlescent sheen; most of it has ruined the sheets. The room smells like a Bath & Body Works, soupy with artificial strawberry and musk and sweat, but Steve could care less. “It’s fine,” he says.

“It’s _not_ fine. I—I usually last a lot longer than that.”

“Billy.” Steve reaches out with a boneless hand, ushering Billy down beside him. “It’s not a big deal. Seriously, you did great. I haven’t been fucked like that since high school.”

Billy scoffs at him. “That barely qualified for a proper fuck, Steve.”

“It was good though, right?” Steve brushes his hair to one side, pressing a kiss to his damp temple before resting their foreheads together. “It needed to happen.”

Billy touches his sticky abdomen ruefully. “You needed it more than I did, I think.”

“I don’t care. I liked it. Like how sensitive you are,” Steve tilts his chin up, holding him by the jaw so he can kiss him, deeply and fervently, “it’s fucking hot.”

“Shut up. _You’re_ hot,” Billy says, gripping his elbows. He rolls them, turning on his side so that Steve can slip an arm under his ribcage. They curl into complete octopus embrace, Billy’s soft, warm nipple held in his palm, one leg thrust over Billy’s thigh. Billy’s hand massages his calf, thick with calluses, toughened from years of hard labor. He’s good with his hands, Steve thinks drowsily; good, and gentle.

When he next opens his eyes, it’s to a breeze on his face, warm and sweet.

Someone’s opened the window, fixed the broken latch with a strip of electrical tape. Beside him, Billy has kicked the blankets off in his sleep. He must have woken some time ago, opened the window to let the air in, and fallen back asleep not long after. He’s wearing Steve’s sweater, his hair fanned over the pillow. Steve pulls the blanket back over Billy’s legs, then slides his hand over his hip, where Billy’s still naked, still warm like an open flame. Steve moves his hand lower, feeling Billy’s body creak to life under his touch; he’s awake. He hasn’t opened his eyes, but Steve senses the shift regardless.

“I was having a good dream,” he says. Billy’s cock is fully hard in his palm, hot and pounding in time with his heart.

“Was I in it?”

“One version of you.” Stroking with one hand, Steve angles his other hand upwards, elated to find that Billy’s nipples are already stiff for him. “Except you weren’t wearing so many _clothes._ ”

A flash of white, glinting off Billy’s molars when he bares his teeth, languid and slow in the aftermath of sleep. “If my clothes are too much of a challenge for you, I can always take ‘em off.”

He turns over, enveloping Steve in the heavy, leaden warmth of his arms. They don’t talk, after that. They only touch.

By the time Billy rests his head back on the pillow, the light has changed. It’s midday, Steve thinks, or maybe later. He usually sleeps after he gets home from work; most days, he sleeps. For Billy, it would be different. He’d wake up at the crack of dawn, be asleep by eight or nine at night. Steve envies him for that. He sometimes forgets that his own sleep schedule is wildly out of the norm for most people.

“Scars,” he says. It’s getting harder and harder to discern the tangle of limbs under the blanket, but he’s almost certain that the leg he’s holding is Billy’s, wrapped tight around his waist. Steve touches the inside of Billy’s thigh, running the flat of his hand over a swath of pocked, marred skin. _Burns_ , his mind whispers, but he’s almost afraid to say it out loud, just in case doing so makes it true. “You have more scars here. I thought you only had three tumors?”

“That wasn’t a tumor.” Billy’s reply is short, sharp. He sounds like he might be holding his breath.

Terrible comprehension dawns on him. “Your dad?”

Billy utters a brief, joyless laugh. “No.” His hand touches Steve’s, drawing his fingers gently away from the scars. “These ones are from me.”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Steve says, too quickly.

“I won’t, then.” Billy moves his leg out from underneath his hand. He’s back to rubbing his knee, in that slow, subconscious way he has. Steve wonders where else he might have scars, hidden under a camouflage carpeting of tattoos. Scars that are more than just wear and tear; scars that tell a story of their own. “Is that okay?”

For some reason, he’s relieved. If Billy doesn’t want to tell him, then it’s probably something Steve’s better off not knowing. “Of course,” he says. “Can—can I kiss you?”

Billy leans in.

 _You really could get used to this_ , Steve tells himself. He draws Billy under the blanket, taking care not to touch his scars. _You could have this to yourself every day, if you wanted to._ He’d never kissed Tommy like this—lazy, unhurried kisses, self-indulgent. Tommy had never let him. Tommy had kissed like he was grasping furiously for something Steve couldn’t give him: an escape, a way out, something bigger than the place they were both stuck in. It shouldn’t have surprised Steve that he’d left first; if Hawkins is bad for him now, it was always bad for Tommy. He thinks the badness might have always been there, not overtly, but … a sense of wrongness, all the same. You tiptoe around it, like something spilled, afraid to look down and see it for what it is … until it spreads. Until the badness touches you, and you have no choice _but_ to acknowledge it properly. Wherever his childhood best friend is now—there hadn’t been a return address on the envelope the Christmas card came in—Steve hopes he found what he was looking for.

When they come up for air, sweaty and out of breath, Steve says, “Your step-mom—” He’s unsure of how to broach the subject, but he knows he must. Billy has gone completely silent next to him, and that could mean anything. “Susan, right?”

Billy looks at him through his eyelashes. There’s a slight frown at the corners of his mouth, as if he’s trying to decide how much to tell him. Steve thinks he’s going to stay silent, at first … until Billy starts talking.

“Dad remarried when I was in ninth grade,” he says, haltingly. “I hated him for that. I hated Susan more, though. She wasn’t mom, she was a stranger, and I sure as shit didn’t make it easy for her, or Maxine. It didn’t stop Susan from stickin’ up for me, the first time I … when dad and I really got into it. She didn’t want him to place the restraining order, she told me … she still emails me, sometimes. Asks me how I’m doin’, how I make a livin’ for myself.”

He shuffles Steve off his chest, rolling over to the edge of the bed to reach for his phone. His back is beautiful, each individual bone in his spine tightening and stretching as he straightens up; it makes Steve want to kiss him all over.

“She loves sending me dumb shit like this,” Billy complains. He rolls back onto his side, resting his chin comfortably on Steve’s chest. Steve pulls out his necklace from where it’s trapped between their bodies and winds the chain around his fingers, staring at Billy’s phone screen. It shows a kitten dangling from a tree branch, a look of comical, wide-eyed apprehension on its face. The words HANG IN THERE, BABY are written underneath in cutesy, storybook cursive.

“So … there’s no restraining order, anymore?” he asks.

Billy shakes his head.

“Do you ever reply to her?”

“A little. Not much. I … don’t wanna intrude.” Billy rubs his eye socket with his fist, then locks his phone. “I know dad doesn’t want me around. I’m fine with that. Bein’ around him … it’s not good for me. I start ruminatin’, I start rememberin’ mom and … and then I get angry. You never saw me like that, so you don’t know … but they’re better off without me. That’s what dad would say, and he’s right.”

“But you still wanna go back there,” Steve says.

“I want a lot of things. I don’t always get them. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, when I say closure is a myth. We don’t get it from other people, we get it from ourselves. _I want_ , we tell our God. Keep my children safe. Give me wisdom. Give me strength. _I want, I want, I want._ Why does this keep happening to me, we ask Him. Help me understand. Send me a sign.”

There’s a disc of sunlight moving across the ceiling. Billy stretches one arm up, his mouth parted in wide, moist-eyed appeal; for a moment, it actually looks like he’s caught the light between his fingers. It’s hard not to notice the way his hand shakes, then; Steve doesn’t understand how he never noticed it before. Then the hand drops, falling back over Steve’s chest, and the illusion is gone.

“It doesn’t fucking matter, at the end of the day,” he says bluntly. “Shit happens, and it happens to everybody: good people, bad people, everyone in between. If I can’t accept that, I’ll only drive myself insane.”

He reaches down, closing his fingers briefly around the medallion chain, then buries his face in Steve’s neck. _Hang in there, baby_ , Steve almost tells him. He doesn’t know if that’s what Billy needs to hear. It might be another meaningless platitude, like _I’m sorry_ and _my condolences_. He’s sure Billy’s heard plenty of those before.

“I have savings,” he says. “I could quit my job. Been thinking of quitting anyway. The pay’s alright, but the hours ...” He waits for Billy to stir, until he knows he hasn’t fallen asleep before saying it: “My mom lives out west, in Newport. I haven’t seen her since the divorce. You … should come with me. If you want.”

The notion seems to amuse Billy. “Wow, Harrington. Someone sticks a finger up your ass and you decide you wanna elope with them?”

“It was more than just a finger,” Steve reminds him. “And … I’ve always wanted to go to Disneyland.”

Billy snorts softly into his chest. When he moves again, Steve’s fighting to keep his eyes open, knuckles still wrapped around the necklace chain. “You’d really do that?” Billy’s frowning at him, uncertain, hopeful. “You’d come to California with me?”

Steve nods.

He has to call mom, make arrangements. He has to tell someone—he has to tell his boss, he has to tell Nancy. _Nancy._ Christ. What should he say to her? Or maybe he doesn’t have to say anything at all. Maybe he’ll just leave, without warning … the prospect is daunting, exciting. Steve knows he doesn’t have to make a decision. Not right now. For now, he has this: Billy’s weight anchoring him solidly to the mattress, Billy’s hands, his mouth, Billy pushing back inside him, keeping him full, sated. They have today, all of tomorrow, all of next weekend and the weekends after that. Steve has the breeze on his face, sunspots on his ceiling, kisses traded under the covers like secrets.

For now, he thinks, it’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Update 17/06/19:** The FIERCELY talented LazyBaker recreated the sunscreen scene in an art piece that has truly won my heart. You can check it out on their tumblr [here](https://granpappy-winchester.tumblr.com/post/185476614146/for-hexlikesramennoodles-for-their-wonderful).
> 
>  
> 
> I don't really want to write a big eulogy about the story ending and all, but this update actually marks 100,000 words that I've written for this pairing, which doesn't matter to anybody but me, lol. I'm just glad I was able to finish this before season 3.
> 
> The song that Steve hears Billy listening to at the start of the chapter is 'Into my Arms', by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. It's a love song, and it's quite sad ... it always makes me think of Billy's momma. There's a lot more I could have written about that—about Billy and who he is and where he comes from, his relationship with Max and his time in prison—and I did write more, but this isn't a story about Billy. It's about Steve.
> 
> Thank you for reading, I hope everyone enjoyed this final chapter!

**Author's Note:**

> Kayla's [tumblr](https://sightetsound.tumblr.com/) and her [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sightetsound/pseuds/sightetsound)
> 
> My [tumblr](https://hexlikesramennoodles.tumblr.com/)


End file.
